A fun charade, but ultimately no point

Rating: 3/10 (27 March 2008)

It's hard to see why Spike Lee's films aren't more commercially viable on their own strength--the man has an eye for beauty and visual storytelling that makes his movies entertaining and enjoyable as much as they are important arguments about the world of ethnic unrest, which movies like Crash show are popular Hollywood fixtures anyway. However, for this reason or that, Lee is not typically considered a "mainstream director", which is pretty much the biggest commercial curiosity this movie incorporates: Lee is making a joint that's a bank heist thriller?
Well, yes, yes he is, and he's having it both ways. What is mostly a straight-forward genre piece is imbued with his floaty, detached camera, and ethnic profiling. The cops not only have to figure out a way to defuse a violent situation, but tensions underlying the community are getting in their way. Up to pretty much the ending, the movie is both a really great game of cat and mouse and a sober rumination on how cultural dysfunction can rise to the surface during some of the worst times.
However, it all basically drops off at the end. After seeing this movie, I became a bit confused about what the point of all of it was supposed to be. At that point, any moralizing about crime or justice in this film drops off into emptiness or is deconstructed by Dalton's insistence that "I am not a hero, and I am not doing this to provide a point." No real purpose resides in Lee's focus on racial tension, either, besides the fact of his interest in it. We're made to believe that Washington's character is satisfied by the diamond he receives, but doesn't that go against the motivation of his character's direct and businesslike manner? A "bad guy" not getting caught is an okay device, but for the purpose of some anti-heroic construction. This movie doesn't have that, it just has what is basically a sequence of events and then the letting go, or even purposeful forgetting, of them. So why tell the story in the first place? Of course, Lee's work is always somewhat ambiguous. Unfortunately, this time his ambiguity lacks real significance.
Anyway, it's a pretty engaging and well-directed piece of work, it just ultimately leaves a lot to be desired. At least it provides proof that Lee can work quite well within the world of mainstream genre film-making, hopefully so that he can get funding for his more purposefully and significantly ambiguous works.
--PolarisDiB