Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: Loser petty criminal is title-track bait for homicidal treasury thief.
Biased, pithy comments: There is a lot to this movie, most especially to the understated racial politics. It seems to be half a fast-paced but dull thriller on the technical ability of, say, ``The Last Boy Scout,'' but it also spends a lot of time developing Jamie Foxx's character from a one-note loser (a la Chris Rock or Joe Pesci in any of the ``Lethal Weapon'' films) into an ex-con falling back into a world of low-rent crime. It's nice that they tried; I've often thought the fast-talking black skel hasn't been done as a three-dimensional character since, really, ``Trading Places.'' Unfortunately, Foxx isn't quite up to the task, and nearly everyone else in the film is better, including Elise, Texada, and Dodds (three attractive ladies given not nearly enough screen time). There's also something creepy about rich white guys (how rich are they? They work for the Treasury Department! They're *that* rich!) following the antics of this ghetto punk and trying to bribe him out of the trouble. I guess what I'm trying to say is even as the movie failed to state it out front, it ends up feeling like an examination of the young black male experience (complete with wild conspiracies about The Man, like that they follow you around from the top of the World Trade Center). The casual cruelty and base corruption of the cops is also of note; it's certainly not a middle-class interpretation of how force is used in our society. Anyway, I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about this stuff and not very much concerned about the plotting; despite Fuqua's excellent vision (although perhaps too frenetic), it's taking itself far too seriously for the intentional humor of the script; one could imagine a different director (and, say, a young Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor) taking the whole production closer to hilarity and away from the brutal gray seriousness of this film. The whole film doesn't really work, but for interesting reasons.
Other Notes: Ah, the poor World Trade Center, shown frequently in nearly every shot of New York. It'll be years before we can see a movie with the WTC without sighing.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Jamie Foxx, David Morse, Doug Hutchison, Robert Pastorelli, Kimberly Elise, Mike Epps, Jamie Kennedy, Megan Dodds, Tia Texada.
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua