Spike, a Sharp Cast and Crafty Script Bring Dimension to Tense Hostage Drama

Rating: 8/10 (2 April 2006)

It's good to see filmmaker Spike Lee come back to form with this highly entertaining popcorn movie that transcends the tense hostage crisis portrayed with a clever plot of psychological gamesmanship and duplicity. At first, the film feels like it's going to be a new millennium update of Sidney Lumet's 1975 classic, "Dog Day Afternoon", complete with Terence Blanchard's jazzy, 1970's-sounding score. Lee, however, spices the story with his own sensibilities around urban survival and post-9/11 racial tensions, and the movie benefits greatly from the perspective of a director not known for such predictable genre pictures. While it runs a bit long at 125 minutes, there is so much zigzag to the proceedings that the length is forgivable.
Impressively written by first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, the plot meticulously unfolds on a precise, need-to-know basis as it focuses on the mano-a-mano game between coolly confident criminal Dalton Russell and cynical NYPD detective Keith Frazier after Russell and his crew hold up a Lower Manhattan bank and keep fifty hostages at gunpoint. This is no standard good-versus-evil melodrama, as Gewirtz and Lee give both characters a lot of intriguing texture which make them fascinating adversaries in an unlikely search for a common bond. Audaciously, Lee chooses not to spotlight so much on the suspense elements of the tense situation at hand since the movie includes flash-forward interviews with freed hostages. Rather, the film is far more involved with the characters' motivations and what they are willing to do to move toward resolution.
An additional wrinkle is the bank chairman Arthur Case, who is worried about securing the confidential contents of his safe-deposit box once the robbery is underway. At this point, he hires Madeline White, a coolly calculating, designer-outfitted power broker willing to negotiate with Russell to get the box. How all four characters dance around each other is the primary pleasure to be derived from the movie, as one keeps guessing what each will do to get to his or her objective. Moreover, Lee's trademark touches are everywhere from the unexpected sparks of comedy - some piercing in their political incorrectness but no less funny - to the artificial backward zooms that make characters look like they are on conveyor belts to the idiosyncratic behavior of the hostages.
Casting is just about ideal here. It's no surprise that longtime Lee muse Denzel Washington is terrific as Frazier, showing the character's flaws, ambition and moxie with maximum fluency. Clive Owen has the most cryptic role as Russell, but he manages to exude supreme confidence and a conflicted conscience with minimal fuss. Leave it to Lee to capitalize on Jodie Foster's inherently chilly intellect and subvert it to make the patronizing White a curiously ambiguous and utterly fascinating figure. There is nice supporting work by Christopher Plummer expertly shifting between benign and treacherous as Case, Willem Dafoe surprisingly non-villainous as the head of the SWAT Team, and especially British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor a completely convincing New Yorker as Frazier's enthusiastic partner. There is a nice twist at the end, but Gewirtz's script makes it satisfying within the context of the entire plot. This is a deft, character-driven thriller most welcome during the typical late winter/early spring movie-going doldrums.