I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, directed by Mike Hodges, is a solidly good film of the revenge thriller ilk. Bleak, minimalist and quite haunting, this film is in many ways a small masterpiece marred, however, by those very attributes that make it strong: bleak, minimalist and insufficiently haunting. A weak and inadequate ending does not help.

Clive Owen plays Will Graham, a retired London hard man, who, in an attempt to escape from a murky, bloody past, has moved away from London and works in the countryside. Since he has gone, "things are changed", as bad-to-the-bone rival gang leader, Frank Turner (Kenn Stott) tells his henchman. Seemingly unable to escape from his past, Will is drawn back to London by the memory of his brother, Davey (Jonathan Rys-Meyers), who, as Will soon finds out, has tragically taken his own life after suffering a brutal rape. Malcolm McDowell plays Boad, the wonderfully creepy (and very rich) rapist. Thus the scene is set for Will's journey of slow-burning revenge, upon which Will has not only to confront real-life demons from his past, but he will also have to face some inner-demons and make choices about who he is, and what kind of a life he wants to lead.

Hodges is best known for the cult -classic Get Carter (1971), also a minimalist film about revenge. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is in many ways like a modern re-make of that film, which however has far more to offer than the standard Hollywood remake, such as the quite frankly dire Get Carter (2000), with Sylvester Stallone. Hodges revisits many of the typical gangster haunts, such as the cheeky-chappy gangster side-kick, whose dialogue consists almost exclusively of cockney impenetrables and expletives. Unusually for the genre, this is not a film primarily about the action of revenge, but about the psychology of revenge. This is also possibly a clue to as to why the film somehow just does not work: it is hard to describe complicated emotional developments and subtle psychological changes in minimalist form with sparse dialogue. Sparse choices are rendered rather too blatantly by a few visual tricks, including Will's makeover, symbolising his return to form and his failure to overcome what he considers to be his inner demons. Hodges' perhaps tries to overcome this flaw with a scene in the middle of the film when the audience is given a brief psychology lesson: Will visits a psychologist to learn about the effects of male rape. This cringe worthy scene is possibly the worst of the film. Apart from the dodgy arm-chair psychology, which self-respecting hard-man would visit a quack? Only Robert De Niro (in Analyze This) can get away with that. One of the best aspects of the film is the cinematography: a dark, claustrophobic London, wonderfully and atmospherically shot in film noir style.

This revenge thriller hardly roars and rampages a la Kill Bill, but it does possess a certain bleak charm, and is a good evening's entertainment.

Oliver Morris, May 2004