Sometimes, Americanized remakes can work — despite my own hesitances against them — and I am hoping that is the case for Sleepless, an adaptation/remake of the intense and slick 2010 French thriller Nuit Blance (Sleepless Night). The first trailer has arrived for Baran bo Odar‘s take on the material, starring Jamie Foxx as a cop with deep ties to the criminal underworld who must probe a seedy nightclub to find his kidnapped son. Odar has three features under his belt before this one, and his growing skill in tandem with the solid cast should hopefully offering a thrilling entry into the single-day-film canon, along with doing Frédéric Jardin’s source material justice.
Foxx has got the tough-but-wounded swagger down pat, selling the desperation and hard-toothed resolve of a father on the brink. Sleepless is lensed by Mihai Malaimare Jr. (The Master, A Walk Among The Tombstones) who seems to have lent the proceedings an immediate and chaotic feeling, while still maintaining a sense of geography and rhythm. Where this is hopefully followed through on is in the editing — by Odar’s frequent collaborator Robert Rzesacz — who will hopefully not be stuck by the pitfalls of countless American action fair, where cutting seems to be made with a digitalized woodcutter. If the film can maintain a strong visual language and sense of place, with confidence in its edits, it can amongst John Wick’s of American cinematic action, as opposed to the Taken 3’s of the bargain bin.
See the trailer below for the film that also stars Scoot McNairy, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, David Harbour (of recent Stranger Things acclaim), Gabrielle Union, T.I., and Sala Baker (an incredible stuntman who has done work on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, among many others).
SLEEPLESS stars Jamie Foxx (Django Unchained, White House Down) as undercover Las Vegas police officer Vincent Downs, who is caught in a high stakes web of corrupt cops and the mob-controlled casino underground. When a heist goes wrong, a crew of homicidal gangsters kidnaps Downs’ teenage son. In one sleepless night he will have to rescue his son, evade an internal affairs investigation and bring the kidnappers to justice.
Sleepless is slated for release on February 24th, 2017 in U.S. theaters.