'The further you run from your sins, the more exhausted you are when they catch up with you.'

Rating: Null/10 (20 August 2006)

Refreshing to view a movie that actually lives up to its hype, and more. This is a bank heist movie that isn't anything that it seems to be. The movie starts with Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) in a very small place, a cell of sorts, but we don't really know if he is in prison or not, because in a long flashback from that opening scene we see that he and a few accomplices enter a bank dressed as painters, and proceed to hold all customers and bank employees hostage.
Denzel Washington is Detective Keith Frazier who assumes the role of negotiator, trying to get the crooks to give themselves up. The interactions of Frazier and Russell, by phone and face to face plays an important part in the story.
Jodie Foster has an interesting role, as Madeline White, a 'facilitator' of sorts for the very rich, able to have the right connections to get things done. To do that job you have to be very pliant with your morals. She is hired by the bank president Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) who, it is revealed, has something in the bank that would be very costly if the crooks stole it. So she has to be allowed to go into the bank to negotiate off the record with Russell. Willem Dafoe has an interesting, low key role as Captain John Darius in charge of the police force that surrounds the bank.
This movie takes a very novel approach and builds to a very interesting ending. The acting, directing (Spike Lee) and editing are first rate. One of the better of its genre.
SPOILERS - SPOILERS. We don't learn how he knows, but Russell is after Arthur Case's personal deposit box, which contains papers, expensive cut diamonds, and a valuable ring. We learn that Case made money by dealing with the Nazis 60 years earlier (approx 1945) while Jews were being exterminated. This was his sin, and he had spent the rest of his life doing philanthropic deeds as a way of making amends. But, as Russell says in a deleted scene (on DVD), 'the further you run from your sins,the more exhausted you are when they catch up with you.' Russell's goal was two-fold, to steal the diamonds for him and his crew, and to expose Case's Nazi connections. He does the latter by leaving the ring in the deposit box, with a note 'follow the ring' which Frazier then could use to trace down and expose Case. The crooks never wanted to steal money, their demands for a 747 and two buses was only intended to give them time to build a small room behind storage shelves, where Russell would spend 7 days, then walk out of the bank with the diamonds and papers. Leaving the bank, as Frazier walks in, they bump, later that night Frazier finds a cut diamond in his suit pocket. In the bank he and Russell had had a very brief conversation about Frazier getting engaged but was broke, so Russell made it a point to get him a diamond. Since they had been purchased by illegal means, it classifies as a sort of 'victimless crime.'