Will Graham (Clive Owen) is a myth, a legend on the streets of the East End, a nostalgic memory. Once he had been the hardest man in London, a king who abdicated from his throne, a man who disappeared off the radar into the countryside, into the wilderness. Will’s younger brother, Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is found dead in his bath, fully clothed. It looks like suicide but it makes no sense. Davey Graham, with his dapper camel hair overcoat and polka dot scarf, was last seen full of life and loving it. What could have forced him to end it all? And will Will return to seek revenge, to reclaim his crown?

The British gangster film has always housed the skeletons of Shakespearean tragedy within it. Get Carter (1971) was a proactive Hamlet. Shiner and My Kingdom (both 2001) were suited and booted reworkings of King Lear. Gangster No. 1 (2000) had as much Julius Caesar running through its frequently let veins as it did homages to Performance (1970) and The Long Good Friday (1986). So it’s no bolt from the blue that Mike Hodges’s long gestating project, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, is at heart a revenger’s tragedy but one that also bizarrely borrows a convention from Elizabethan farce: sexual appearances can be deceiving. All that occurs in Hodges’s new work relies on men being men and not appearing to be anything other than. The real transgression is that a male rape is the blue touch paper that sparks off this cycle of violence. Or perhaps that should be cycle of threat or perceived threat. The film’s chain of events and dominant paranoia are created by the uncertainty over whether Malcolm McDowell’s rough taking of Rhys Meyers is an act of retribution or an assertion of power. I’ll save revealing the motivations behind it as Will and Mickser’s (Jamie Foreman) investigation into the why and wherefore is the main source of suspense in the film.

The emasculating act of forced buggery is an extreme form of a perceived loss of power. Here they rarely kill you, they just take away what supposedly makes you a man. The independent coroner suggests to Will that Davey may have involuntary ejaculated during the assault. The loss of control, the suggestion that a heterosexual man could be fucked into “‘enjoying it,” to be molded into a queer or a woman, pervades the film and is intolerable within this community. One thug is bound and dressed in lingerie, lipstick and blusher. His leader (Ken Stott) rejects him; covered in make-up the heavy no longer has any value. Mickser’s cred is endangered by one of Stott’s thugs after having his cigarettes bought for him. To continue this menace through dating etiquette, Stott’s warning is followed by money for flowers. Mickser here becomes pre-feminist, a woman unable to pay for things with her own money, a widow for Davey who’s left in his flat grieving until Will comes knocking. Like some Fifties melodrama hero, Will is a lost lover returning from the past, none of the doors are expecting him, all are deadlocked. It is pointed that Will has flat keys from all the men from his past, but not to the woman who he left behind. Helen played by the gorgeously androgynous Charlotte Rampling wears somber trouser suits, a marked difference from Davey and Mickser’s dandy wardrobes.

Here clothes maketh the man. Will spends most of the film in a traditional masculine manifestation. Unkempt, beard, dirty lumberjack clothes, day-old sweat. He is wild testosterone wandering around a jungle of gentrification. As he lurks near the dinner parties and the clubs seeing the façade, the tailored suits and the £100 haircuts of the killers, robbers, and rapist, we realize that once Will decides he will seek retribution for his brother’s humiliation, he will have to dress like them again. He’ll have to lose his authentic maleness, make his cheeks soft and hairless with a straight razor, don a pressed three-piece. In this milieu it’s what passes as acceptable manliness, yet in Hodges’s eyes this reverting back to revenge and the look of revenge (one that he helped establish with Get Carter then dissect with 1972’s Pulp) is a less male act. To take revenge is an act of futility, akin to the opening and closing shots of a man driving golf balls into the harsh, grey sea. Trevor Preston’s script does not chicken out at the conclusion with this ideal—everything is fruitlessly left open ended. The gang war Will’s presence has sparked off is never resolved, Rampling’s final predicament never explicated. Many balls are hit into the air without ever finding their hole.
—BOB CARROLL