The murder mystery Sleeping Dogs is Russell Crowe's best film for a while.

It’s an engrossing plunge into the film noir tradition and it’s a pleasure to watch Crowe embody the very fallible Freeman.

This is certainly not a crime thriller in the dourly realistic “cold case” vein; it is outrageously over-the-top at all times, with crazy and almost dreamlike convolutions of plot, and yet its silliness is enjoyably dramatised.

Russell Crowe brings his typical bravura to Sleeping Dogs but can’t save this overly familiar and tattily written detective yarn.