Martin Scorsese is a director who immerses his audience in the meticulous details of the criminal underworld; Quentin Tarantino takes Scorsese's conventions and infuses pop culture and a wry sense of humor. Both owe a debt to Mike Hodges, who was making crime thrillers (including the original "Get Carter") before either one of them came along. Owing more to the classic film noir style of early cinema than its contemporary imitators, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is well-structured, tightly paced, and genuinely enthralling with a minimal reliance on flashy visuals and booming violence. When young, charismatic drug dealer Davey Graham (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) takes his life after inexplicably being raped one night, his brother Will (Clive Owen)--a former mobster gone into voluntary exile as a woodsman--returns to avenge his death, but not without finding out why first. This forces him to reconcile with characters he's become estranged from (including former girlfriend Charlotte Rampling, who still possesses a striking luminosity after all these years), to the point where his immersion back into the bustling real world is as much a part of the plot as the revenge itself. He's a man of few words, with a vague history and an undeniable physical presence--in scenes of exposition (particularly the explicit discussions of rape), Hodges conveys Will's delicate internal outrage through a minimum of means. Perhaps the key factor to the success of "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is its graceful unwillingness to bend to the altar of crass one-liners and loud explosions, instead opting for a maturity that goes unseen in many of today's crime thrillers.
Review of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
