It's another in a recent spate of vigilante justice films that try to get the audience's sympathy by making the vigilante a victim of racism, sexual abuse, whatever. Sure, I'd be one of the first to argue that rapists, child molesters, and other sexual abusers deserve to have their lives ruined, but I'm not the law of the land (yet), and neither is vigilantism. The movie's central premise, never argued, is that the justice system doesn't work; therefore, true justice can only be achieved by distorting, manipulating, or flat-out ignoring the system. That's a disturbing argument to me, all the more disturbing because it's never questioned, because it's assumed that two -- or four, or ten -- wrongs make a right. In contrast, look at The Accused -- the rape victim got her justice in court.
The performances are as good as you'd expect from a talented group of actors like this, but they're emotionally distant and unengaging. I never really cared about any of the characters. The most personable were Dustin Hoffman as a drunken lawyer who rises inexplicably to the occasion, and Vittorio Gassmann as the friendly local crime boss. (And by the way, whose sick idea of a joke was it to put a Last Tango in Paris poster in one of the characters' apartments?)
In the end, the best that can be said about Sleepers is
that,
with Robert DeNiro and Hoffman, it makes the Kevin Bacon Game that much
easier.
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