Spike Lee dropped issue-oriented auteur aspiration for hired-hand director in producer Brian Grazer’s tricked out bank robbery caper.* (Did Grazer partner Ron Howard pass?) No big themes in this one, just big movie stars jostling for attention (Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor) in Russell Gewirtz’s original screenplay. Heist leader Owen clues us in via soliloquy right from the start, as does Lee who slips in one of those Zoom-In/Track-Out shots* famous from Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Spielberg’s JAWS, a technique he’ll return to two or three times later when he’s not dancing his camera around the action. Look for a real humdinger of a shot when chief hostage negotiator Washington glides toward us on some sort of tightly framed 'dolly' wagon while everyone else is running on foot. Just how bored was Spike? These technically showy things can be fun in the right situations, but here they’re just camouflage for a robbery/hostage drama that turns out to be a Shaggy Dog story. Even treading water, all those stars were enough to make this a modest hit, but, for once, Hollywood didn’t fall for good grosses, and Gewirtz has had little to show over the next twenty years after this debut feature.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Best guess, Lee thought he could make a sort of TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE/DOG DAY AFTERNOON combo out of this. Ironically, Denzel Washington remade PELHAM three years later.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Or is it Zoom-Out/Track-In?
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