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SLEEPING DOGS: Russell Crowe Cast in Police Thriller

Russell Crowe Sleeping Dogs

Russell Crowe cast in police thriller Sleeping Dogs

Russell Crowe plays a detective in director/writer Adam Cooper’s police thriller.

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Despite working regularly and diligently, Russell Crowe as a celebrity apart from his work has been recently subjected to less public scrutiny. Now he spearheads Adam Cooper’s police thriller, Sleeping Dogs. He presumably plays the lead, Detective Roy Freeman, the beneficiary of a revolutionary treatment for Alzheimer’s, and back on the job.

The use of a plot device as a cure for the degenerative disease in Sleeping Dogs is innovative as well. Over the decades Alzheimer’s disease has fallen into generic usage as typical dementia in seniors. But in reality, it also occurs in otherwise clinically robust middle-aged people, irrespective of their demographics.

There is no better choice than Russell Crowe, middle-aged himself but still hale and hearty, for the role of the cured cop. With his portrayals of quirky outsiders under his belt, such as Bud White in L.A. Confidential, John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, and Jeffrey Weigand in The Insider, Crowe is sure to stamp Freeman’s character with particular credibility.

The gimmick in Sleeping Dogs, according to the logline available, involves an innovative therapy that wipes the brain clean of the disease, but taking any memories made during its course along with it. While allowing patients to resume normal lives, the twist lies in challenges Freeman must face when returning to his last case, a homicide still unsolved, finding himself back at square one. (We may try imagining the narrative in Memento in forward sequence.)

The 2017 novel on which the film is based, “The Book of Mirrors” by Romanian crime novelist Eugen O. Chirovici, is something of a popular phenomenon on its own. It is one of the few novels most widely translated across the globe. The book is divided into three parts with its own protagonist, each handing off to the next. Sleeping Dogs focuses on the third and the character of Detective Roy Freeman.

Director Adam Cooper has a hand in adapting the novel with his previous associate, Bill Collage. They had worked together on Assassin’s Creed and Allegiant, the last installment of the successful YA dystopian franchise, Divergent. This collaboration was apparently a successful one; both films turned a very tidy profit.

Hopefully, bringing Russell Crowe aboard kicks this production into higher gear after a delay of four years. With Cooper and Collage adapting the script, we may speculate on where they might take Sleeping Dogs, apart from the fictional cure. The loose thread (as implied in the synopsis of the book) picks up where Freeman comes in, but with no mention of a cutting-edge treatment for his dementia. But as a plot device to up the ante for the hero, it’s certainly a clever enough obstacle to evoke sufficient fortitude and someone to root for.

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David McDonald

David Erasmus McDonald was born in Baltimore into a military family, traveling around the country during his formative years. After a short stint as a film critic for a local paper in the Pacific Northwest and book reviewer, he received an MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, mentored by Ross Klavan and Richard Uhlig. Currently he lives in the Hudson Valley, completing the third book of a supernatural trilogy entitled “Shared Blood.”
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