Spike Lee does the heist movie, and does it well. He understands the form, and plays off it nicely. In the end, though, the film failed to satisfy.
Clive Owen plays the robber. Denzel Washington plays the cop. The dynamic between them is solid, but there’s just not enough of it. The movie presents a tense situation, but there isn’t much of a feeling of tension to the movie, if that makes sense. It’s more of a technical exercise than an exercise in supsense. From the first line of dialogue, it’s clear that this is a movie with some serious slight of hand going on; nothing is as it seems, and all that. As a result, I spent so much time watching for the trick, that all the stuff going on around the fringes faded into the background.
Part of the problem, for me, may have been that I watched the movie in two chunks. I started to fall asleep about halfway through, just about the time Clive Owen started talking about Nazis. Figure once you bring that into a “simple” bank heist, you really need to pay more attention than I was capable of paying. It’s possible that some of the tension of the movie was released as a result of splitting it in half, but I’m not sure how much of a difference that would have made.
