Sleeper (film) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gary Arnold

Critical Essay by Gary Arnold

Woody Allen's Sleeper is fast, inventive and delightful: a slapstick chase comedy set two centuries in the future, the better to satirize the present. (p. 126)

Sleeper has some of the acceleration and momentum of a Mack Sennett comedy. The situations and gags accumulate and snowball for stretches of ten or fifteen minutes, usually climaxed by a renewal of the chase. Then Allen seems to take a breather for a few minutes before resuming his all-out, headlong comic attack. His machine doesn't have a classic, smooth-running hum, but it gets you where you want to go, and I think the brief rest stops are necessary in feature-length slapstick.

Despite occasional lapses—Allen shortchanges a few sight gags after setting them up quite nicely—Sleeper impresses me as the most incisive and consistently funny Woody Allen comedy to date. (p. 127)

If Woody Allen continues to leave certain segments of the mass audience...
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