OK script, so so direction

Rating: 5/10 (31 October 2010)

The script was very clever, almost too clever by half. We all liked the 6th Sense, were there was a twist at the end. But we all hated every other movie M. Night Shyamalan has made, since there was not a twist meant to be enjoyed, they were tricks meant to make the director feel smarter than us. Spike Lee does not get quite so bad as M Nighty Night, but he travels perilously close to the edge of showing contempt for his audience. The saving grace here is that he did not write the script. The script was one of those deals where a creative guy sits around and tries to figure out how to do the perfect crime. we know it is a perfect crime since the robber speaks directly to us, twice, and tell us so. I do wonder how the robbery completely failing made it a success, but I am too literal to recognize this great art anyway. Anyway, so far so good.
Then the scriptwriter adds the Jodie Foster subplot. Then Spike has to start jumping the time line around, like some hack director that wants to be like Memento. I suppose that the creative team felt so clever and daring, to keep the entire audience asking what was going on, since that was part of the plot, that the robbers made a confusing situation to rob the bank. But see, when you are on the inside with a intimate knowledge of the script, it may seem artistic and clever, but we peasant peon subhumans that actually have to pay 9 bucks to see this have to do it in real-time. We don't get to study and script and have creative meetings with butt boys lighting our cigarettes and laughing at our jokes for a 9 months. Same thing when they show the bank assault. We are somehow supposed to know that is not a real event, just what would happen if the characters did it. Jeez, sorry Spike, I didn't make the meeting, I didn't get the memo. So when Spike smash cuts to a hostage interrogation a day after the robbery, he knows he has jumped a day, but everyone in the audience, and I mean every single human being, is scrunching up their forehead and asking "what the fu<& is going on?" And that little bit of profanity brings me to the other problem with the movie, that urban sensibility, where everyone uses the coarsest language imaginable, and all the wives act like porn stars. That on top of that is the normal cute little bantering and wisecracks in life-and-death situations. Boy you can tell when an upper middle class kid is trying to act like he knows the hood. At least Eminem is white trash trying to act like black trash. Spike has a lot harder time pulling it off. I have to tell you though, that when the wise-a$$ New York know-it-all takes of his mask and starts talking smack like all the other New York wise-a$$ know-it-alls, it was so great to see him being dragged by his ankles through the building screaming and begging for his life. We should do this to the whole city, one person at a time.
I see why Hitchcock was so brilliant. He did not hold his audience in contempt and he did not keep things from us so he could feel superior and in control. So if you can put up with all the ghetto talk and the trickery and getting jacked around by someone teasing you, well, this is a pretty cool movie. Watching it the second time is much better. You know when Spike is jumping around in time and you know that the scriptwriter is going to trick you a couple times. Its hour and 51 minutes into the film before you see the robbers little construction project and you start to realize that the robbery is still in progress, although you are never really sure of anything since Spike has jumped the time line so much.
I think the movie was saved by the actors, Denzel, and Jodie, and that fruitcake cop that slapped the Chinese kid in Boondock Saints, perhaps the most embarrassing performance by an actor in the history of this galactic quadrant. At least in this flick Spike kept him away from the Pacino pills that make you foam at the mouth and chew bites out of the scenery.
I also love how Spike tries to make a statement about excessive violence in the kid's video games, in the same movie where he puts a gun to the bagged head of a hostage and blows her brains out. Oh, I see, when computer programmers do it, it is exploitation and objectification of your culture. When you do it, well, that is art. Yeah, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Oh, credits role and they show a clapboard and outtakes over the credits. Great, see Being There for how a director can rob his actors of an Oscar by showing outtakes at the end of the movie.
After the second viewing, I am sitting here still wondering what the heck the bank robber was doing. Did the Wiesenthal Center pay him to go steal the jewel and expose the bank president? Why did he not take the diamond? Did he get other diamonds, like the one he gave Denzel as he walked by? Who the heck paid for this robbery fiasco? Oh yeah, does anyone know why they dug up the sewer line? Did they send jewels down it or what? --