SLEEPING DOGS (1997) I wish I'd slept through this dog Sleeping Dogs isn't quite entirely worthless. I haven't added a new movie to The Pile in a few years - I don't watch four a day anymore, and I'm trying to be at least a little picky. But this might come closer to being worthy of The Pile than any movie I've seen in that time. It opens in Los Angeles, 2029 - which is like regular Los Angeles but it's always night and there are police helicopters in the air all the time. It just wouldn't be future Los Angeles without the police helicopters. Scott McNeil is a Harry Maxwell, catburglar trying to steal some emeralds from Sanchez Boone (C. Thomas Howell), who has a bunch of scantily-clad hot women cutting and polishing the merchandise. As McNeil climbs onto the roof of the building, he mutters to himself "I've really got to get a day job", and "Harry Maxwell, you are getting too old for this shit." Once inside, he sneaks about (would it surprise you to know there's a part where he screws around with the surveillance system and the security guard, noticing a few seconds of snow on the screen, knocks on the monitor as if to "fix" it?) but is soon engaged in a firefight against multiple opponents with machine guns firing out of slits in bulletproof doors. Neither he nor the dozen or so hot women in the room are hurt in this battle, much less the guys with the machine guns, since it's probably hard to hit them when trying to shoot using that trendy sideways gun grip with (trendy) both guns. One of the hot girls (Heather Hanson, who is given many, many opportunities to flip her long blonde tresses around) helps him out, but is unable to escape with him under her own power, because she's afraid of heights. So he knocks her out and tries to carry her to freedom. Of all things that he could steal during a burglary that he wasn't originally planning on stealing, you'd think he would have picked something he could carry easily, instead of a person. He does manage to get outside with her, but soon enough there's a big fight between Howell's goons and the police. There is even a scene where Howell destroys his office, and is trendily shown confidently striding away from the explosion in slow motion. Maxwell and the girl escape detection by hiding in a crate full of weapons and accidentally locking themselves in. Now, that's just the opening heist scene, that's just the beginning. Take all the dumb of this scene and try to imagine how it might be employed in a movie which mostly takes place on a spaceship. Yes, Howell is apprehended, marked "S.D." (for social deviant) and put into hibernation for transport to a prison on Titan. That weapons crate is stored in the same hold as Howell and several other frozen cons. It must've been a boring trip in that crate, since it's dark, there's nothing to do, and the trip is long enough that even the cons are spared the tedium by being put in hibernation. A stray asteroid frees Howell, and...yeah, it's basically Die Hard on a spaceship, but way worse than you're thinking. You might wonder how C. Thomas Howell could make a convincing villain; he does not, though he does have a goatee, apparently having attended the Evil Spock school of villainy. Howell starts by employing a difficult-to-identify accent, then spends the rest of the movie alternating between an English Villain accent, talking like Sideshow Bob, and mincing about like an interplanetary Harvey Fierstein. He gets lines like "Now that wasn't very nice" and "Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly." Later conflicts in the movie involve exchanges such as "That ship is full of innocent people!" "Innocence is a state of mind." I don't know who to single out for a poke from the bony finger of mockery - one Chris Hyde is credited with the story, but I can't find a credit for the script itself. I imagine the person who wrote it might have paid good money to keep his name off of this movie. There has to be at least one redeeming element to save a movie from The Pile, and that redeeming element here is Kiara Hunter, playing a malevolent (though sexy) android who's convincingly programmed to enjoy being mean. She's also easily buff enough for the part - the imdb says she's "Former Miss Canada, Miss Fitness BC, Miss Fitness Canada Silver Medalist, Miss Venus Int'l, Miss Ujena of Canada, Miss Fitness Body Pro of Ujena, professional cheerleader and national team swimmer", which is a pretty good start if you're gonna play a kill-bot. It seems like everybody in this movie kinda looks like somebody. Some friends came by while I was halfway through this and kept saying "Isn't that...no, it isn't." Lacking my own perverse need to occasionally subject myself to dreck like this, they pleaded with me to turn it off. My mercy might not extend to this movie, but it does to them, so I taped the rest and watched it later. They don't know how big of a favor I did them. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE