Sleepers review

 Number 792 on the top 1000 films of all time is the legal crime-drama Sleepers.

Lorenzo "Shakes" Carcaterra (Joe Perrino,) Tommy Marcano (Jonathan Tucker,) John Riley (Geoffrey Wigdor) and Michael Sullivan (Brad Renfro) are four boys growing up in the Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood of New York. Father Bobby Carillo (Robert De Niro) keeps a watchful eye over them. But when a childish prank goes horribly wrong, the four boys are sentenced to Wilkinson's Home for Boys where they experience horrific abuse by the guards led by Sean Noakes (Kevin Bacon.) Cut thirteen years into the future, the now adult John (Ron Eldard,) Tommy (Billy Crudup,) Shakes (Jason Patric) and Michael (Brad Pitt) swear to take revenge on everybody who did them harm.

Sleepers is very much a story of two halves. We have the lives of the boys before they attend Wilkinson's and their lives afterwards. If anything I preferred the first half. We're given a rich tapestry and a deep insight into life within Hell's Kitchen. There's no doubt that our four protagonists are little shits, but they are still interesting to watch.

And then things go south in the second half. The narrative tension just stops, as we enter a courtroom drama. The contrivance of all four boys all being sent to the same prison aside, the second half was not as neat or tightly focussed, as the first half. *spoilers to follow*

Upon release, John and Tommy become hitmen in the Irish mob. By chance they see Noakes in a bar and they publicly assassinate him. The case goes to court. Michael, now an assistant district attourny, seeing an opportunity to punish the rest of the guards who abused them, takes the prosecution with the intention of botching it. He enlists the alcoholic Dan Snyder ( Dustin Hoffman) to defend John and Tommy.

But the problem lies in how Noakes was killed early on. Noakes was the ringleader. He was the big, bad villain. The other guards were just his cronies. Without him, we're just seeing John and Tommy being persecuted for a revenge kill that the audiences knows they were justified in carrying out. It was dull.

It would have been more interesting seeing Sean Noakes, and the other guards, standing trial for the atrocities they committed. Instead, we were focussing on John and Tommy. And that killed any narrative suspense. The second half felt almost disconnected from the first. It didn't help that Noakes' cronies were little more than names on a page with little characterisation other than being a crony. The one exception was Ralph Ferguson (Terry Kinney) who was the only guard to express any remorse over what he did.

Even though there were some big names in the cast; Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Dustin Hoffman have five Oscars between them, I don't think anybody really shone. Brad Pitt and Dustin Hoffman only appear in the second half and De Niro was closer to a supporting character.

Overall, Sleepers was an entertaining if uneven film that went to sleep in its second half.