Diário de um Crime

This is a film that has you thinking about it later on for a few days. You can't seem to get it out of your mind. I found it absolutely enjoyable. The storyline and the acting is terrific. Suspenseful and intoxicating.

This movie should have been great.

The acting is great. The locations are excellent, as is the photography, editing and so forth.

The premise is clever, the opening scenes of the script intriguing, and the actions of the characters logical given the circumstances. A few scenes are riveting, and the sequence of events, at least for the first half of the movie, captures your attention completely.

My feeling is that the film was cut, to the point where we are left with only the basic storyboard. The ending is questionable, probably because there are missing pieces of information.

Hopefully, the whole film was shot, and someone will go back and re-edit the final version someday. Or perhaps I am filling in a script that was not revised enough - who knows? But my gut feeling is that this film could have been quite extraordinary.

WHERE SLEEPING DOGS LIE is one of the least well known of the psycho thrillers that filled cinema screens in the early 1990s. The reasons for this obscurity become obvious when you start watching, because this is poor stuff indeed; it commits the cardinal sin of a thriller in that it's thoroughly boring, with hardly any incident or indeed mystery to keep it going.

The story is about a young writer (AMERICAN HORROR STORY's Dylan McDermott) who moves into a supposedly haunted old mansion and befriends a drifter (Tom Sizemore) who comes to stay. Sizemore can usually be relied upon to deliver interesting performances, and indeed is the most interesting thing about this movie, but sadly the calibre of the writing is so poor that this is near-unwatchable for the most part.

In an attempt to capitalise on current trends and popularity, Sharon Stone (BASIC INSTINCT) appears in the rather extraneous role of the writer's literary agent, although her appearance only serves to add some minor titillation and lots of dull, talky scenes which pad out this never-ending thriller that lacks both thrills and suspense.

The script telegraphs all of its "surprises", the direction is strictly by-the-numbers and Dylan McDermott is a bland lead. There are only two noteworthy elements in this movie: the dangerous, edgy intensity Tom Sizemore brings to his role, and a couple of steamy moments provided by Sharon Stone, who was then at her best-looking phase; at one point she actually says to McDermott: "Don't fret, you 'll get the check in a week and you can have me now". Now that's what I call a GOOD DEAL. (**)

I was left waiting, and waiting... and waiting. "Where Sleepig Dogs Lie" is a sleepy, and cold-hearted psychological thriller with a lot converstational pieces and reflective posturing which doesn't go anywhere with it all. Dylan McDermott plays a struggling writer Bruce Simmons who moonlights as a real estate agent to earn some cash, yet he moves into the house he's meant to be selling after finding himself homeless. There he accidently uncovers the house's dark history - the previous tennants were brutally slaughtered by a murderer who was never caught. So there becomes the basis of his next novel... without realising what he's really getting into. Also a stranger (Tom Sizemore) arrives on the scene asking if he could rent out a room, and Bruce obliges. However in doing so, he might dig up a past best left alone.

So the premise had me hooked, just the execution left me lukewarm. The thing is, it was predictable and you could see the twists in the story coming. So you're just waiting for the thrills and spills to make up for its uneventul progression, but they never eventuate in spite of the dangerous predictament evolving. Which makes it rather boring because you're waiting for McDermott's character to figure it out and when he eventully does (takes him long enough) you'll think suspense would be at boiling point, yet its simply flatlines and rushes through its anticlimax.

It's disappointing, because I liked Sizemore's jittery performance. He grows particularly unnerving as film goes along, and it really does faulter when he isn't on screen becuase he is the most fascinating character. Forseeable traits, yet the chemistry between McDermott and Sizemore's characters is what the plot hangs off. Details upon details lead to uncomfortable and factured truths, and two minds are presumably after one end. Its just can you live with the consequences. And the final few minutes paint it perfectly. It's just the journey to that point was too straightforward that it lacked the ups and downs to keep me fully invested.