Sleeping Dogs (2024)

Adam Cooper's Sleeping Dogs arrives with the grim determination of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of apologizing for it. Russell Crowe plays Roy Freeman, a retired homicide detective whose Alzheimer's disease has left him with a memory like a colander, and who must reassemble a decade-old murder case before an innocent man is put to death. The machinery is familiar: cold cases, a buried baseball bat, unreliable recollections, a final twist that reconfigures everything we thought we knew. It is competent, moody, and entirely uninterested in the culture wars.

The progressive inventory here is thin and largely incidental. Pacharo Mzembe appears as Isaac Samuel, the wrongfully convicted inmate whose ten years on death row supply the plot's ticking clock. His race goes unexamined, and the carceral system functions as a backdrop, not a target. Karen Gillan's Laura Baines is a researcher denied credit for her work by a male mentor, a grievance that fuels her scheming without ever being framed as a broader indictment. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental sermon, no class critique, no celebration of bodily difference. Crowe's character suffers a neurodegenerative illness, which the film deploys for narrative disorientation, not as a platform for identity.

What remains is a genre exercise that mostly wants to entertain, and for stretches it does. The wrongful conviction subplot carries a faint whiff of tragedy, though the film never stops to lecture us about it. Crowe shuffles through Melbourne with admirable weariness, and the pleasures on offer are the old ones: suspicion, revelation, the slow click of a mechanism. Films like this used to be the bread and butter of the multiplex. Now they arrive quietly, do their job, and vanish. There is something almost quaint about a thriller this indifferent to the moment. It means well by nobody in particular, and that, in its modest way, is a kind of relief.