Sleepless Night Remake Reawakens With Jamie Foxx and Michelle Monaghan

By  · Published on January 30th, 2015

Dreamworks Productions, LLC

Remember when we told you to see Frédéric Jardin’s exhilarating thriller Sleepless Night, but then you were all disappointed to learn that it’s a subtitled movie and said you’d wait for the remake? That was a few years ago, and to your credit there was actually a Hollywood version announced immediately following its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. Well, if you’re growing tired of waiting, you will be glad to hear that the English-language remake is back on track after being dropped by Warner Bros. According to Variety, now the rights are at Open Road, which is happy to announce they’re producing the movie with Jamie Foxx and his Due Date costar Michelle Monaghan in lead roles.

Foxx will play the (anti)hero (originally portrayed by Tomer Sisley), a corrupt cop who has to navigate a labyrinthine nightclub where his son is being held hostage by a crime boss. Not that they’d have to keep with same-gender casting, but I assume Monaghan will play the Internal Affairs detective (Lizzie Brocheré in the original) who is trailing and meddling in the dealings of the main character, screwing up a drug exchange that gets the son kidnapped in the first place. Baran bo Odar, who directed another foreign crime thriller we like called The Silence, is taking the helm of the Sleepless Night redo, which was scripted by Andrea Berloff (World Trade Center).

Why you can’t just enjoy the original is up to you, but for your sake I hope that the second version is as intense and energetic and uses space as well as the 2011 film. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie that made me feel like I was being pulled through a real, complex location quite the way I felt with this. I saw Sleepless Night at TIFF as part of the Midnight Madness program alongside The Raid, and they made a great pair because they share the concept of having almost all their story take place in a single building. Therefore they also have shared in being likened to Die Hard. Sleepless Night received far more such comparisons, though, I think because it’s so easy to label it “Die Hard in a nightclub.”

Now it’s going to be interesting to see which of these films’ remakes gets to theaters first – and which one, if either, was actually more worth rehashing.

Christopher Campbell began writing film criticism and covering film festivals for a zine called Read, back when a zine could actually get you Sundance press credentials. He's now a Senior Editor at FSR and the founding editor of our sister site Nonfics. He also regularly contributes to Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes and is the President of the Critics Choice Association's Documentary Branch.