I'll Sleep When I'm Dead Details

This crime drama has impeccable credentials, reuniting Mike Hodges and Clive Owen — director and star of Croupier — and revisiting territory Hodges explored so memorably with Michael Caine in Get Carter more than 30 years ago. As with Carter, the central character is a gangster out to investigate and avenge the death of a brother. Here, Owen has turned his back on crime and almost on civilisation — he's living out of a van, working at a remote logging camp — when the suicide of his brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) forces him back into society. Despite the film's pedigree, an excellent cast and atmospheric camerawork, there are huge problems with the structure and truly woeful script. The audience pretty much knows what happened to Davey at the outset, which dilutess any potential for suspense; plot developments make little logical sense while the violent climax lacks any real drama.

Cockney criminals in a familiar story of low-life vengeance with a grim and laconic protagonist; it is well enough done, though there seems little purpose in doing it again.