By Robert Scucci
| Published
1997’s Too Much Sleep is a very relatable film for me because, at my core, I am an intensely lazy person. I try to use as little mental energy as humanly possible in most day-to-day activities because I like to be on autopilot. However, I’m not sleepwalking through life. I simply frontload, or manually automate all the effort, so I can focus on what’s important and then move on to the next thing. It’s an efficient way to baffle my family because it seems like I can effortlessly get through my days, even though I’m, without a doubt, constantly spiraling over how time is the one thing we never get back.
In Too Much Sleep, though, we experience a different kind of laziness. A profound form of laziness that comes from our protagonist, Jack Crawford (Marc Palmieri). Every issue he runs into stems from him nodding off and not taking in his surroundings in any meaningful way. The way he carries himself leads to an inciting incident in which his unregistered firearm is stolen, and from there, his lackadaisical approach to life sends him on a wild goose chase alongside a wannabe gangster who never shuts the hell up.
The whole film’s reason to be is to point out how suburbia can be more interesting than people initially think, and how the colorful characters living there are far more interesting than they let on. It plays out more like a series of vignettes than a fully coherent movie, but the vignettes are worth the price of admission.
Jack Is Lacking, And Carelessly Packing
Our hero, if you could call him that, in Too Much Sleep is Jack Crawford, a 24-year-old security guard who’s about as unremarkable as a person can get. He lives at home with his mom and spends most of his time sleeping. He packs his lunch and his late father’s unregistered firearm in a brown paper bag. One day, while riding the bus, Jack thinks about giving his seat to an elderly woman who can barely stand, but only makes the move after she asks him. That’s how lazy he is.
This semi-forced act of kindness kicks off Too Much Sleep. Jack stands up next to an attractive girl on the bus named Kate (Nicol Zanzarella), puts his bag down, zones out for an indeterminate amount of time, and snaps back to reality once he realizes it’s gone. He can’t go to the cops because the gun is unregistered, and reporting it would mean admitting to a felony. But he needs to find it, which leads him to wannabe mobster Eddie DeLuca (Pasquale Gaeta).
Eddie never shuts up. His introductory scene involves a long-winded story about a doctor shooting a laser at his private parts, which you know is going to end in a barely satisfying punchline. We never hear the punchline because Jack interrupts him with his predicament, and the two get to work solving the mystery of the stolen firearm. Most of their exchanges from that point on are some variation of this dynamic.
From there, Too Much Sleep sends you on a wild goose chase where Jack stalks elderly women, searches gay bars, and stumbles through other forms of amateur sleuthing that come off as incredibly invasive if you don’t know the context. Jack has reason to believe Kate is somehow involved with his missing gun, but until he can prove it, he’s stuck riding along with Eddie, who never turns down a free meal and almost always overstays his welcome. He also has a knack for hooking up with older women, though it’s probably in spite of what he thinks is his signature charm, which is speaking almost exclusively in profanity.
It May Put You To Sleep, But That’s Okay
If there’s one movie that definitively falls into the “low stakes” category, it has to be Too Much Sleep. The entire mystery, and the protagonist trying to solve it, are so lame that I’m inclined to think it’s by design. Jack’s overall sense of nonchalance, and the borderline innocent nature of his predicament, are offset by everybody else he encounters. Eddie does most of the heavy lifting, chewing the scenery, while much of the humor comes from Jack’s looks of bewilderment. He’s just trying to find his missing gun so he doesn’t get in trouble, but Eddie complicates everything with his insistence that this crime goes all the way to the top.
Odds are, somebody just grabbed Jack’s bag on the bus thinking they were about to score a free lunch. But in Eddie’s mind, this is a vast conspiracy that can be traced to a single, yet-to-be-named antagonist, and only he has the connections to piece it together.
The beauty of Too Much Sleep is how little it has going on while still making it entertaining. It’s a day-in-the-life story about a 24-year-old manchild who needs an incident like this to force him into being productive, even if that productivity involves trying to solve an allegedly complex mystery that probably has a painfully simple explanation.
Too Much Sleep is short and sweet, and the kind of movie you can throw on right before dozing off. It’s a series of standalone moments that kind of, sort of form a movie, but the plot is almost beside the point. You just want to hang out with these characters for a while because they’re fun to be around.
As of this writing, Too Much Sleep is streaming for free on Tubi.
