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Director Mike Hodges, whose Get Carter has become so popular with men in their 20s, is on a roll. Croupier (1988) introduced Clive Owen to American audiences, and the two have reteamed for Hodges’s latest, a noir meditation on masculinity, alienation, and crime. Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a small-time drug dealer who commits suicide under mysterious circumstances. His brother Will (Owen), who’s been living in the woods, far from civilization, returns to the city and finds himself being drawn back into the world he sought to escape. Hodges establishes an unsettling, moody tone that carries the story through its rough patches, but it’s the increasingly vengeance-driven Owen who propels the film. He has little dialogue, and what there is reveals plot, not emotions, but the slump-shouldered, world-weary stance he affects is betrayed by the anger in his eyes. Owen makes I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead an antidote to the summer-blockbuster blues. (103m)
BY BROOKE HOLGERSON
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