Shaggy dog bank heist: a smooth entertainment that ultimately fizzles

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2006)

Spike Lee's personal inside job, a conventional bank heist film that has a shaggy dog twist on the genre and a spattering of feisty Spike-isms about Sikh's profiled as "rag-heads" and robbed of their turbans by cops, a racist video game played by an 8 ¾-year-old black boy from Brooklyn bothering the white head robber, an Albanian ex- called in by a bystander to identify a distraction tape, a puzzle about Grand Central andwell, they're the best of the film so it's best not to give them all away. And the film sparkles sometimes because its creaky machinery, echoing such outdated classics as the explicitly referenced Dog Day Afternoon, is kept going by pros like Denzel Washington, as the head cop, Christopher Plummer as the bank president with an anachronistic secret to hide, Jodie Foster as the suave fixer he hires to hide if for him, and Clive Owen as the preternaturally calm bank robbery mastermind.
It's also intriguing that a small group of robbers take over an austere downtown Manhattan bank, terrorize several dozen bystanders who become hostages, and dress them all up to look alike -- and like them. Likewise it tweaks our genre-tired curiosity to see as things drag on and the pizza gets stale that the robber doesn't want the dough, doesn't want the 747; doesn't want to kill hostages (or does he?): what the heck does he want? But at some point even though the pacing is good, we gradually stop caring. And then it's not just the pizza but the suspense that has gone stale.
I guess the young first-time screen writer Russell Gewirtz's story appealed to Spike because it hinges on a rich white guy whose wealth all got started with a mega-wrong: cooperating with the Nazis. One trouble: the actor's too young to have done that. Another trouble: he wouldn't have saved the incriminating document. A third: evidence of his wrongdoing would be in a dozen places other than that document. How Clive would know about this, and how Clive would get away with his final escape trick, are not to be asked; this clever story that seems to have entertaining new twists on convention, takes a long time to get to an anticlimactic and bumpy finale. What are Jodie and Denzel doing sitting on that bench at the end, chatting? Not a darn thing, except taking a bow.
Even though Lee can't edit himself down to under two hours and this movie splits its seams a bit, he is a pro and he can entertain and provide original socio-political commentary -- this time the more effective for being plot-driven and not crudely in-our-face. But the trouble is the excitement generated by the setup and the interplay between members of the cop hierarchy (including Willem Dafoe and Chiwetel Ejiofor), and the usual phone calls and negotiational gambits and challenges, goes into that slow fizzle-out once it's clear the robber is just stalling. Stalling is stalling. There's only one act of violence that might get your heart rate up again, and if you've been paying attention, it won't.
So in the end, if you like Spike Lee's efforts to be mainstream, and you don't care if they quite work, this is an entertaining film. But if you expect real punch or quirkiness from Spike, don't come knocking, not this time.