Spike Lee offers the prospect of a couple of new angles of interest. First is the open acknowledgment of his debt to, or kinship with, Martin Scorsese, who co-produced the movie, and whose frequent actor Harvey Keitel has a leading role in it, and whose two-time scriptwriter Richard Price authored the original novel and collaborated with Lee on the screenplay. Second is the novel itself, a 600-pager, which would seem at first glance, or at first lift, to provide a sturdier narrative foundation than customary for Lee. But the best bits of the book -- to do with a Hollywood actor "studying" a brink-of-retirement police detective on a routine homicide case -- have been completely expunged on screen. (Could it be to avoid comparison with The Hard Way, starring Michael J. Fox and James Woods? But why avoid comparison with that?) In addition to which, the personalities of the homicide detective and his partner have likewise been expunged. And when the drug-dealing protagonist and prime murder suspect -- a black teenager with the street name of Strike -- asks the detective at the end why he cared so much about the case, the detective (who hadn't been trying to impress a Hollywood actor or been on the brink of retirement) can come up with no answer. In truth, much else about the case also remains unclear, unmotivated, unbelievable. The novel no doubt is partly to blame. Its expansiveness would appear to be the result of a constricted, compromised, collaborative screenwriter loosening his belt in private and just letting himself go -- and go and go and go. Squeezing the narrative back to conventional screen-size has squeezed the whole purpose out of it, along with most of the life in it, leaving something dry and drab, unshaped and unpaced. Put simply, Price didn't write it as a movie; he wrote it as a Great (Big) (Fat) American Novel. If he had set out in the first place to write a movie, he would doubtless have planned a different route; he would not simply have gone over the same route skipping and jumping. With Mekhi Phifer, Delroy Lindo, John Turturro. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd