Film Review: Sleepless

Deciding to remake a brilliant foreign language action film into a substandard Hollywood B-movie presents some sad questions. Will the majority of English-speaking audiences turn out for a French action film, even if the film had Oscar buzz? No. Will adapting it and ‘going big’ with a Las Vegas setting and big stars severely lessen the film’s overall impact? Yes. Will the dialogue in the new adaptation be so poorly written and irrelevant as to render the English language adaptation essentially worthless? Yes.
Swiss director Baran bo Odar and Straight Outta Compton writer Andrea Berloff have remade Frederic Jardin’s 2011 French thriller Nuit Blanche, casting Jamie Foxx as corrupt Las Vegas cop Vincent Downs. When Vincent and his partner (Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris) rob a huge cocaine shipment, they find themselves caught in a turf war between crooked casino boss Rubino (Dermot Mulroney) and Novak (Scoot McNairy), an unhinged mobster. Desperate to get his drugs back, Rubino kidnaps Vincent’s teenage son – but Vincent is also being trailed by a relentless Internal Affairs investigator (Michelle Monaghan), who is determined to catch him out as a filthy cop.
Odar keeps the original’s dawn-to-dusk timeline, and tries to create a frenetic energy by allowing violence to build through the floors of Rubino’s luxury casino, with fights and bloodshed spilling into bathrooms, hotel rooms, kitchens and nightclubs. But the confined setting feels rather meaningless and repetitive, and rote characters telegraph any “surprising” allegiances early.
Jamie Foxx is far too talented for such generic material, which betrays both the original and its title by proving utterly snooze-inducing.