Sleepless (2017)

Sleepless arrives as a remake of a French thriller that almost nobody in this country saw, and it conducts itself accordingly, as a machine for moving Jamie Foxx through a Las Vegas casino at speed. There are corrupt cops, a kidnapped son, a bag of cocaine, and an Internal Affairs investigator played by Michelle Monaghan who spends much of the running time being told to go home and get some sleep. The film is competent at the business of chase and shootout, and it was received by critics with the enthusiasm usually reserved for a malfunctioning elevator.

What interests us here is the film's complete indifference to the cultural conversation of its own moment. It was released in January of 2017, a period when even the most cynical studio product was finding ways to gesture at something larger, and yet Sleepless gestures at nothing. The cast is diverse in a manner that now feels almost quaint, Jamie Foxx in the lead, T.I. and Gabrielle Union in support, and the screenplay never once remarks upon it. Race is not a subject. Gabrielle Union shoots a henchman and the moment passes without comment. This is not timidity. It is a thriller with no other business on its mind, and the film's racial politics begin and end with the payroll.

The result is a picture that feels older than it is, and occasionally better than its reputation allows. There is no sermonizing, no lesson, no pause for the audience to consider its own complicity in anything. The villains want money. The hero wants his son. The moral is that Las Vegas is full of bad men, which is not a thesis so much as a location. For a genre exercise, that counts as a virtue. For a cultural artifact, it is a void, and the void, in this instance, has been scored accordingly, which is to say quietly and without incident.