A waste of time. Dumb. Two stars out of five.

Rating: Null/10 (15 March 2008)

Who chooses the main comment that shows below the movie? They're almost always so positive, even when, as in this case, the movie doesn't deserve it. This is one of those movies with so many twists and turns in the plot that the whole story feels completely faked-up. It gets boring after the fifth or sixth plot "surprise." Yeah, yeah, so things are not what they seem - AGAIN. Maybe it's all going to turn out to be that they're only making a movie of a robbery instead of a real robbery, and the cop is just dreaming it. Who cares?
Acting - did someone say Jodie Foster did a commendable job? Holy {blank}, what baloney. She overacts something terrible, making faces in an attempt to express some sort of feeling and strutting around, for no particular reason, like king of the hill. As if this kind of movie requires acting anyway.
We've just got to say something about the dialogue writer - a clever young fellow straight out of script writer's school is my guess. He makes such an effort to be sharp and punchy that the dialogue often turns the characters into two-dimensional figures, mere mouthpieces. It keeps making you think, "People don't talk like that" and "Where did she come up with a line like that at such a moment." The characters often seem totally unbelievable. I'd say Jodie Foster's character is the worst for that, unlike anyone conceivable in real life.
And how about these bookends for the movie? At the beginning Denzel wants to go home and have sex with his wife. After all the complicated action, the movie ends with him going home and having sex with her. Wow, what a satisfying way to end. Oh, and at the start he's under a cloud of suspicion and - miracle of miracles - he's told at the end that the cloud has been lifted. No more story to it than that, just a completely pointless, bare addition to the story, as if the writers created it at the last minute by inserting four or five extra lines of dialogue here and there. Stupid.
Stay away from this stinker of a movie. I'm mad at this movie for wasting my time and insulting my intelligence. Come on, Spike, do your thing with socially relevant films, not forgettable schlock like this junk.