Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sleeping Dogs’ on Hulu, a Russell Crowe Movie About an Ex-Detective With Alzheimer’s

Sleeping Dogs (now streaming on Hulu) is my third Russell Crowe B-movie to hit streaming over the past few weeks, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are far worse gigs – like, say, gutting out cruddy John Travolta or Mel Gibson B-movies, or slightly-too-generic Liam Neeson B-movies, although the you-never-know-what-you’re-gonna-getness of Nicolas Cage B-movies has its allure. Stepping past his priest roles in The Exorcism and The Pope’s Exorcist, and as a hoo-rah military lifer in Land of Bad, Crowe embraces another character cliche in Sleeping Dogs: the weary, lonely, retired detective. There’s an asterisk on this one, though – the weary lonely retired detective with Alzheimer’s disease. And of course, as inevitably happens to weary lonely retired detectives with Alzheimer’s disease, especially if they find themselves in hacky movies, they’re forced to piece together shattered memory fragments in an attempt to solve an old case. In other words, brace yourself for a big, viscous dose of unreliable narration!

SLEEPING DOGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: You can tell Roy Freeman (Crowe) is a bachelor because the notes he puts up all over his house reminding him how to make toast or what his birthday is are scrawled on strips of duct tape. I mean, Post-Its are far more aesthetically pleasing, but they just aren’t as reliable or pragmatic as good ol’ manly, impressively sticky duct tape. As we take in many establishing shots of these notes, the one that struck me as most poignant reads, “It’s okay.” So it’s not great but ultimately OK that Roy opens the microwave to find a cooked TV remote in there, or can’t remember his middle name. Such things are to be expected, and rolled with. 

His isn’t a hopeless case, however. He had experimental surgery that might make his life more tenable: doctors cut open the very top of his skull to install implants designed to rewire his brain. He has to take his meds and keep his mind active by doing puzzles or reading books and stay off the booze, which was a problem in the past – he was forced off the force after he was the perp in a drunk-driving accident. And then the phone rings. It’s an activist helping a man Roy put in the slammer for murder a decade ago. The guy’s on death row. His execution’s near. And he swears he’s innocent. 

Before we ask why Ray has a box of files and crime scene photos from the case in his house instead of at the cop shop like it should be, let’s go over What Happened. A prominent professor, Dr. Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas), was bludgeoned to death in his home with a blunt instrument. Ray and his partner Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan) hauled in petty crook/addict Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe) and got a confession out of him. Open and shut! Or maybe not! So Ray pulls on a stocking cap to cover his scars and visits Isaac, whose pleas are compelling. Looks like Ray’s got a new puzzle to solve, and it’ll be extra challenging, because his memory loss is so unpredictable.

Ray drops in on Jimmy, who he hasn’t seen in years. Then his investigation turns up a goofballish fellow named Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood), a former student of Wieder’s. However, Finn is freshly deceased, which isn’t particularly helpful. But Finn wrote a memoir about the time he was trapped in a love triangle with Wieder and his research assistant, Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), events presented here in a lengthy flashback. So we’ve got an unreliable narrator dropped into a fractured-memory narrative, doubling our pleasure. Eventually, Roy tracks down Laura and learns that she was angry at Wieder for allegedly taking all the credit for their research, which, of course, is about (checks notes) “memory reconsolidation through accelerated resolution therapy.” What a strange coincidence! And what about Wieder’s groundskeeper, Wayne Devereaux (Thomas M. Wright)? He seems a mite shady. Everyone seems to have a motive, so, you know, who really dun it? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Recent films Memory and Knox Goes Away starred Neeson and Michael Keaton, respectively, as hitmen with memory-loss afflictions – and all of these feel at least a little bit indebted to Memento.

Performance Worth Watching: The strange thing about Sleeping Dogs is how Crowe is the only person who seems to be taking this story seriously. Everyone else is on the verge of camp, yet he seems fully committed to his character’s quandary – which pretty much illustrates how he’s overqualified for this role (and many of his other recent outings, too). 

Memorable Dialogue: “Wow, another reliable witness,” Laura says sarcastically, at about exactly the same time the audience says it

Sex and Skin: A couple of brief non-graphic sex scenes.

Our Take: In case you’re wondering what Sleeping Dogs central theme is, it’s memory. Everyone in the movie discusses it pointedly. Jimmy talks about it, Finn writes about it, Wieder and Laura do research about it, and of course Roy lost it and is trying to regain it. Ultimately, does he really want to, though? No spoilers of course, but the end result of Roy’s investigation is telegraphed throughout, with director Adam Cooper, co-writing with Bill Collage, cleverly situating the poor guy in a place of desperate irony: The more he remembers in an attempt to improve his quality of life, the worse his life gets. That’s noir for you, I guess.

That conceit is about as clever as the movie gets, though. It’s a very busy thing, overcomplicated by half, its narrative tangled and borderline-unwieldy, with several nudge-winky performances coexisting uneasily alongside Crowe’s existential brooding. Cooper seems to enjoy running around and hammering nails right on their heads, too: In case you can’t comprehend that Roy is piecing together a puzzle in this plot, there are scenes in which he sits at his coffee table and pieces together an actual jigsaw puzzle, which he begins at the beginning of the movie and finishes at the end of the movie. All that convolution, all those highly subjective points-of-view, all that intrigue, just to land – pop! goes the last piece of the jigsaw – at the most disappointingly obvious conclusion. And despite Crowe’s apparent intention to give us an empathetic portrayal of an Alzheimer’s patient, or our hopes that the film might be an insightful treatise on the nature of memory, the disease is ultimately a device, a condition that waxes and wanes exactly when the plot needs it. That’s exploitation for you, absolutely.

Our Call: Let Sleeping Dogs lie. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.