Jodie Foster matches wits with a Hannibal Lecter of a different sort in Spike Lee’s spunky crime thriller about a bank heist that just won’t stop. That is, it refuses to turn out as planned by Ms. Foster’s character, Madeleine White, a political fixer with more friends in high places than Moses.
Denzel Washington is Detective Keith Frazier, a man who has paid a lot of dues and is facing a glass ceiling based not so much on his race as his incompetence and Chiwetel Ejiofor is his sidekick Detective Bill Mitchell who is a better cop but gets paid less. So we have the most bitter, corrupt and morally dissolute at the top of the ladder and the best behaved at the bottom. Is there cynicism in this Spike Lee movie? OK, a little. But it is a pretty good yarn anyway.
Since Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie’s “The Usual Suspects” (1995) everybody is trying to come up with the next great noir suspense thriller. Everybody wants that great plot twist combined with that great leading man (or woman) who is the perfect enigma: the perfect combination of the crook and the saint, the punk and the genius, the Lord and the devil. The maverick who, in the American tradition, breaks all the rules and succeeds anyway just because he is so darn good. He is smart, he has a work ethic, and he doesn’t get fat headed and blow it. Unfortunately, Clive Owen ain’t him. But he’s close. Close enough for this film and close enough to while away a Saturday evening at the shopping mall multiplex.
Owen plays Dalton Russell, a mysteriously angry man with a need for grand larceny that is never so much explained as it is exuded through dialogue clipped closer than a poodle-shaped hedge and logic so terse that it makes Mr. Spock look verbose. Casting this movie must have had some interesting moments when the crew discussed that fact that the leading man would wear a mask covering his entire face in 90% of the scenes, converting the part into mostly a voice-over narrative. If this contributed to the selection of Mr. Owen we hope he does better in future parts. But it was the same lot for the rest of the heist crew and most of the extras who played the hostages. The little kid with the video game got more screen time than the entire rest of the inside-bank cast put together. And he wasn’t that good.
Which beings us back to five time Oscar nominee and two time Oscar winner Denzel Washington and award winning Chiwetel Ejiofor (Doctor Okwe in “Dirty Pretty Things”). To be specific—what are they doing here? For one thing, they are having a pretty good time by the looks of it. And putting a few bucks in their bank at the same time. No doubt this film’s backers hope the audience will join in the fun as well. But if screenwriter Russell Gewirtz and director Lee hoped to form a buddy team out of these two, they should have thought twice. When Jodie Foster gets thrown in for good measure it is just too much working with two little.
Foster plays a very well connected political fixer in the city where a lot of things need to be fixed (New York). There is no place she can’t be and nobody she can’t talk to. Her office is big enough to swing a bank robber in and her male secretary looks like he jumped out of a Calvin Klein ad. She is supposed to be smug and self-assured, but there is too little time for us to get to know her that well. As a result, she comes off as being phony. Nobody is that good. Except maybe Verbal Kint or Captain Kirk. Another Oscar winner thrown to the wolves.
But at least she’ll make expenses on this one because it is bound to be a hit. It has universal appeal, a minimum of bloodshed and violence (the R rating is light duty), a great rocking sound track and some sweet photography in the city no one can hate for long.
And even if the screenplay bears criticism, you won’t figure out the ending until the lights come up in the multiplex. At least not all of it.
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