Too Much Sleep Movie Review

Indie filmmakers who want to make their own version of After Hours better damn well know what they're doing. In his first feature, David Maquiling appears to have a grasp of the basics, but his film falls short of its goal.

At its heart, Too Much Sleep is an extremely simple story about a young man named Jack (Marc Palmieri), a lazy security guard who finds his father's handgun stolen during a bus ride daydream. His quest to retrieve the gun sends him on the kind of wacky misadventures seen only in the movies. With his friend's uncle Eddie (Pasquale Gaeta, apparently channeling Bruno Kirby in The Freshman here), Jack visits male strip clubs, foreign parties, and even a Chinese restaurant in order to track down the mysterious Kate (Nicol Zanzarella), whom he suspects of conspiring to steal the weapon. Naturally, we expect Jack will also find himself along the way.

Sure enough, Jack falls for Kate en route to a whiffle bat beating of the ultimate crook, but unfortunately, writer/director Maquiling muddles his metaphors to the point where the audience becomes ambivalent toward all his characters. Palmieri's Jack is such a sorry deadpan fool we hardly care whether he'll retrieve his (illegally owned) gun. Kate has so little screen time we don't really feel their relationship is a wise choice for either character. Only Gaeta's Eddie comes across as likable (despite the fact that he's a dishonest lech); his Mafioso-wannabe is simply too deliriously acted to be seen as anything but innocuous.

Sure enough, Too Much Sleep comes across as exactly that: innocuous and sleepy, an overly dry shot at creating something quirky that misfires as often as it hits due to a misconfigured sense of comic timing. Filipino-American Maquiling describes his film as an homage to the timeless "folk story," presumably something passed down orally from generation to generation. My kids will have to be content with digging up the videotape somewhere decades from now.



Asleep at the wheel.