One of the best in it's genre.

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2006)

From the opening sound track (Indian?) to the satisfying ending, this is a most entertaining and engrossing movie. I hated having to go to the loo half way through! Bank robbery movies are great for tension and, these days, high tech gadgetry. They also let us try and decide how/if the bad guys are going to escape. This one skips around the gadgetry and goes for sleight of hand, but it has tension in spades and an escape scenario that is brilliantly conceived, and almost believable.
Most of all it has great actors, with great lines, and a great Director - Spike Lee. Not only three super stars (Foster, Denzel, and the mesmerizing Owen), but other greats like Dafoe, and Plummer. and a slew of choice little cameo parts for the acting studios latest graduates. It's so well crafted that one can forgive it the inevitable "I don't think so" moments.
Clive Owen and three ( or are there more?) accomplices walk into a Bank dressed as painters. They terrorize everybody in to ridding themselves of their cell phones - a post 911 must - and then dress them in the same outfits they change into: Jump suits, with hoods, and face masks, and sun glasses. Then they set to work...not robbing the Bank. They rip up the floor in a storage room; but why? They leave the money sitting in it's plastic wrapped blocks. They demand buses and a plane but seem to be in no hurry.
Jodie Foster is hired by the owner of the Bank (Plummer) to negotiate with the robbers for the contents of a safe deposit box that he insist must not see the light of day. Jodie gets to play Ann Coulter on amphetamines. Blond, smart, take no prisoners attitude, and the best legs of any CEO. She's a "fixer", and though she insists she doesn't need to know Plummer's secret, we all know she has to have it, because that's how she got to be so damned irreplaceable and powerful - by knowing everybody's dirty little secrets. A bitch with J. Edgar's talent and expertise.
Denzel Washington is fleshing out his "cop with a problem in his past" role from "out of time", only this time he's in New York and he's nobody's patsy. We know he's going to get his man, but who is that "man" exactly? Everybody under estimates him, and when he makes his biggest mistake, we are surprised and feel sorry for him.
Clive Owen gets the best lines, many of them said dead pan into the camera, or into the face of Jodie or Denzel. He's tough and smart, and has figured out every detail of the robbery, but he's no sociopath, and at times we wonder if he's a vigilante criminal, out to right some wrong.
Spike Lee makes this movie hum with tension and great scenes, many of them small little gems, such as the racist cop trying to tell Denzel about being shot without using racial epithets, which slip out any way; or the knock out Albanian lady who can translate the robbers taped conversation; or her ex husband, a New York Construction worker who is loathe to let her get any glory.
Lee, throughout the movie, also lets us in on the investigation interview scenes that take place after the robbery, teasing us with some of the answers but too few to make a difference. He never lets the action lag, nor swings off into unnecessary cul de sacs for character development, and lets the intelligent screen writing show us the characters, and lead us through the plot with terse, meaty dialog. Spike, you've done the genre proud!