“Sleeping Canine,” starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a rusty crime thriller. It’s uneven, poorly lit, brooding, overloaded with suspects, and almost content with its contrivances. But in his logical, booby-trapped method, he keeps you watching.
Crowe, with a white beard and shaved head that makes him look like Santa Claus as a brooding biker, plays Roy Freeman, who is forced to flash his badge after causing a drunk-driving accident. Now, he is in the midst of major intermediate dementia; He wrote labels on tape and stuck them around his condo so he can remember everything from his own name to where the fresh water is. The brilliance of “Memento” is clear enough, but it’s also a coincidence that the film is released just a week after “Knox Goes Away,” Michael Keaton’s riveting thriller about a hitman with dementia. This film is gentle; this one, directed and co-written by Adam Cooper, feels made for VOD. But not every piece of noir dementia has an actor who can think like Russell Crowe.
Roy has two fresh incisions on the top of his head, the results of an experimental surgery he underwent to stimulate new neural pathways. As the film progresses, his reminiscences begin to come back, very slowly, in hallucinatory flashes. But first he is contacted by a death row inmate, Isaac (Pacharo Mzembe), who Roy helped arrest 10 years ago after getting him to admit to murder. Isaac, who is about to be executed, now claims to be harmless; we imagine it because otherwise there would be no film. But he admits he was right there, at home, the night Joseph Wieder, a famous Waterford College professor, was beaten to death with a baseball bat.
Who is it? The film returns to an instructional love triangle played out with a faux sophistication so sharp it’s almost kitsch. Márton Csókás, cutting the ham with jovial cunning, plays Prof. Wieder as an old-school campus mentor-seducer who lives in extreme style and peppers his speech with unctuous pauses. His beloved lab assistant, Laura Baines, is played by Karen Gillan as a brilliant, flame-haired polymath who we know from the moments we meet her would be the film’s femme fatale, because no one so good would be so sweet. And there’s Laura’s latest conquest, a misanthropic aspiring novelist played by Harry Greenwood, who is tall, with long hair and a nerdy groan, and who knows how to highlight the self-loathing encoded in a certain kind of “mental” banter. . .
We see the story unfold from multiple points of view, with each character’s version filling in a part of the puzzle. But when the big picture comes into focus, that doesn’t make what happens any more convincing. There is a mysterious memoir/manuscript known as “The Mirror Impact” that several characters claim to have written. There are other suspects, such as the professor’s handyman, played by Thomas M. Wright with a Charles Manson contact, as well as Roy’s ex-partner (Tommy Flanagan), who appears to have engineered a cover-up. And there are some real screams, like: How can Roy, from the get-go, ask complex questions about social media when he can’t even remember his own name? And who would try to eliminate a murder weapon by burying it in the backyard of the house where the murder occurred, right in the middle of the garden, in a rectangle of earth that sticks out proud like a sore thumb?
What works is the way Roy, stripped of his reminiscences, now sees the world. It is with newly opened thoughts. As Crowe does it best, with his eyes stuck in some insular zone between the round and the harmless, Roy’s cognitive impairment actually helps him remedy the crime. And as his memory grows again, what he discovers, in fact, is that he is more worried than he imagined. “Sleeping Dog” is an easy, partly clever string-puller, but that would be all if the film didn’t have Crowe to carry it with remorseful silence.
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