In a hotel suite, Vincent tries to convince Bryant that he’s been working undercover (not for vice but for Internal Affairs), and she refuses to believe him. At one point Vincent poses as a hotel worker, in blue work duds and cap, and he’s got his head down in an elevator, so that Bryant the IA investigator won’t spot him - and then, just like that, he glances up, and she spots him, and the only reason he did it is that the director, Baran bo Odar, thought it made for a cool shot. The movie is also not very plausible, in a way that cuts down on its entertainment value watching “Sleepless,” you have to keep dimming your perceptions downward. And that’s likely to be reflected in an underwhelming box-office performance. It’s far from incompetent, but it’s a who-cares? thriller. Foxx is too good an actor - taut and committed - to phone in his performance, yet that hardly matters, since the whole movie is phoned in. A remake of the 2011 French/Belgian thriller “Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche),” “Sleepless” is a propulsive thin exercise, “energetic” but tedious, the kind of January movie that Jamie Foxx should have permanently graduated from. Vincent is in deep hot water, but there’s one problem that transcends all the others: He’s stuck in a movie that’s such a terse, minimalist litany of cop-movie clichés, with a script that minces no words because it barely bothers to come up with any, that almost nothing about his situation is very enjoyable. She’s got plans to expose him, and after he stashes the drugs over a casino men’s-room stall, she goes in there and takes them, removing his only power card. Then there’s the Internal Affairs agent ( Michelle Monaghan) who is sure that Vincent is a dirty cop.
But since Vincent is supposed to be delivering the kid to a high-school football game, he has to keep lying to his ex-wife (Gabrielle Union) about the son’s whereabouts (it beats saying, “Uh, sorry, he’s tied up in a kitchen closet somewhere”). To secure and retrieve the drugs, Stanley Rubino (Dermot Mulroney), a natty weasel of a casino owner, has kidnapped Vincent’s 16-year-old son, Thomas (Octavius J. Vincent is now carrying 25 kilos of cocaine (street value: $7 million) that could get him killed. He and his partner (played by the rapper T.I.) just killed two crooks they shouldn’t have, and they also ripped off a more dangerous drug dealer than the one they thought they were working. In “ Sleepless,” a stylishly hollow crime thriller set in Las Vegas, Jamie Foxx plays an undercover cop named Vincent Downs who is up to his goatee in Big Problems.
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