One of the best heist movies for a very long time

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2006)

One of the greatest pleasures the cinema can afford is the well-orchestrated heist movie. Unfortunately, they don't come around often enough so who would have thought that one of the best for a very, very long time would come from none other than Spike Lee. This is unquestionably Lee's most commercial movie to date. That he has carried it off with such consummate skill, while at the same time diluting his own political attitudes hardly at all, is quite an achievement. In other words, he hasn't sold out and has made one hell of an entertainment into the bargain.
The film begins with Clive Owen talking direct to camera and telling us he is going to rob a bank, setting out the who and the why. The how is the movie that follows. Lee cuts straight to the chase and the opening scenes of the robbery are brilliantly detailed. The plot's a real tease. We know from the outset that this is no conventional robbery. We are in a hostage situation from the word go and when the robbers start demanding a getaway plane ... well, we've been down this road before. But as hostage negotiator Denzel Washington tells Owen, 'Didn't you see "Dog Day Afternoon"?' In other words, bank robbers don't really expect planes to fly them to God-knows-where with a pile of people they didn't really want in the first place. The fun is in figuring out what is going on. And the plot twists are as nifty as they come: a brilliant device are the flash-forwards to the hostages being interrogated by Washington and partner Chiwetel Ejiofor. Are these clues or just red-herrings? In a movie like this the element of surprise is everything and Lee, working from a first-rate script by Russell Gewirtz, keeps us guessing.
As the louche, lippy detective in charge, Washington is excellent. He looks like he's having fun. And Jodie Foster is terrific as ... well, let's just say her CV would make very interesting reading. The part could just as easily have been written for a man but whereas a man would simply have been a sleazy villain, Foster manages to be both charming and sexy; (she's a charming and sexy piranha fish, as she says, her bite is worse than her bark).
Often movies like this tend to run out of steam before the end. Once we know the denouement things have a tendency to dip but Lee keeps it ticking along nicely for a coda that should send you out of the cinema with a reasonably wide grin on your well satisfied chops.