More honesty in criticism is one of my New Year’s resolutions, so here goes: “Sleepless,” a Las Vegas-set cop thriller starring Jamie Foxx, actually put me to sleep for a few minutes. Fortunately, like the character who bumps his head and almost drowns in a women’s spa, I wasn’t unconscious for long. OK, I missed the scene in which Foxx hides 25 kilos of cocaine in a men’s lavatory, but the exposition in this movie — even when yelled over the heavy drone of dance music and gunfire — is thick and repetitive enough to keep you from getting too lost.
Or, for that matter, too engaged. Don’t get me wrong: “Sleepless” is far from a terrible movie, even if it is being dumped on the second weekend of January without advance media screenings (which is almost the theatrical equivalent of hiding it in a men’s lavatory). It’s nice to see Foxx in what you might call a change-of-pace role, though given his too-long absence from movies since the ill-fated 2014 remake of “Annie,” the mere sight of him on a movie screen now qualifies as a change of pace.
Director Baran bo Odar orchestrates the smashing of bodies and automobiles with a moody, Michael Mann-esque panache, often cutting away to aerial establishing shots that make the Strip look like a shimmering nocturnal jewel box. But all that glitters is not gold, and at a certain point, Odar’s intense atmospherics — amplified by the throbbing bass notes of Michael Kamm’s heavy, percussive score — start to feel like the work of a filmmaker on genre autopilot. A stylish surface goes only so far to disguise the fact that we’re being sold some pretty cut-rate goods.
This is less a criticism than an observation. The movie is an English-language remake of a 2011 French thriller called “Sleepless Night,” but even if you haven’t seen that earlier picture (more honesty: I haven’t), you may detect smudges of similarly gritty, adjectivally titled shoot-’em-ups such as “Taken” and “Waist Deep,” each of which centers around a father going to extreme lengths to rescue his kid.
