Clever crime caper

Rating: 8/10 (26 March 2006)

This is a clever crime caper comedy/drama from Spike Lee with authentic NY atmosphere (you can almost smell the bagels and coffee), astringent dialogue, and a hole in the plot you could drive an armoured car through. There is fine acting from a mostly obscured Clive Owen as the chief robber and a brown suit-wearing Denzil Washington as the lead cop, with significant contributions from Jodie Foster (in a rather improbable part of a super fixer), Christopher Plummer (suavely villainous as usual) and Willem Dafoe (cast against type as the most sensible person in the NYPD).
A bank siege is one of the great movie/TV clichés but this one is off-beat enough to hold the viewer's interest, despite going on too long (125 minutes) and having too many diversions  though we are spared too many sub-plots. Some nice camera work is helped by "cosy" production design  it's an appropriately crowded film. The intercutting of the story with post-robbery interrogations, done without giving the game away was a clever touch also.
The hole in the plot? Well, again without giving the game away it seems the robbers are not so interested in the bank's money as in the contents of a certain safe deposit box. We not told how they found out about it, but the contents, we are told, will severely embarrass the respected elderly citizen whose box it is (and who happens to be the chairman of the bank). But ask yourself, why on earth would the person concerned have kept this particular incriminating document? It has no value to him. He has no incentive to keep it. Yet he keeps it in the box for 60 years. Has he got a death wish? Have I missed something?