Monty's plan is to have dinner with his dad, a former firefighter and barkeep at an Irish tavern, meet his friends for drinks, stop by a club and work out something with a Russian mobster. 11, 2001 more on this later.) As the movie gets rolling, Monty starts off on his final day of freedom with his well-behaved dog, Doyle. (The whole movie takes place in New York after Sept. Cut to sweeping shots of Tribute in Light, the temporary Twin Towers memorial, seen from uptown and across the rivers, co-starring with the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Message: He's an unsavory guy, but he has a heart. I wouldn't dare challenge Lee on race, and he has and should make more stories that transcend the subject, but the timing of this one is unfortunate.īefore the credits roll, Monty rescues a beaten and abandoned dog. Social politics? A dis on the Rockefeller drug laws and a slam on Dawson's New York-born character for getting a Puerto Rican flag tattoo after a vacation to our island commonwealth. Now there's "25th Hour," a drama based on David Benioff's novel, starring coffee-and-cream Rosario Dawson, forcing herself to just act natural, and a white-bread cast of Edward Norton, Hoffman, Paquin and Brian Cox. The movie, however, tanked commercially and earned mixed reviews. I thought it was one of Lee's best you could tell he had been burning to make it for years. It's hard not to read "25th Hour" as a reaction to Lee's last film, "Bamboozled," a passionate, fevered story about black stereotypes in popular media - not exactly the kind of subject addressed with any kind of gravity by anyone else making movies. The guy is probably one of the 10 most talented filmmakers of his generation - for his energy, his ambition and that climatic scene in "Do the Right Thing" alone - and this is what he does with it? A clumsy, oh-well story about the moral quandary of a drug-dealing recidivist who more or less deserves to go to jail? There are pieces of "25th Hour" that are exhilarating - a scene in which Monty busts on every ethnic group in New York a club scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman finds the guts to take Anna Paquin up on a dare - but they only suggest how much life is missing from the rest of the movie. The story is plodding and spare, and the movie seems to take forever to unfold, but the forward motion, such as it is, comes from three pieces of unfinished business: Monty has to figure out if his girlfriend is a rat, say goodbye to his dad and his childhood buddies, and decide whether he's going to skip out on his sentence. Spike Lee's "25th Hour" is about Monty's last day in New York before going to prison. Someone ratted him out for selling drugs and now he's looking at seven years.
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