Unabashedly commercial enterprise from Spike Lee, a lightweight heist-and-hostage caper with a heavyweight cast: Clive Owen as the bank-job mastermind, Denzel Washington as the New York cop who catches the call, Jodie Foster as the smugly enigmatic free-lance troubleshooter with friends in high places ("My bite's much worse than my bark"), and Christopher Plummer as the philanthropic moneybags, plus a couple of poised middleweights, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Willem Dafoe as role players on the police team. The script by Russell Gewirtz (his first to reach the screen) is thick with intrigue: the robbers seem in no hurry to gather their loot and make their getaway, and the Chairman of the Board at Manhattan Trust is concerned to safeguard nothing but his own safety-deposit box. Having stirred up a slight bit of interest, however, the script neglects to answer key questions (how does Owen know what he knows? how did Foster get where she's got?), and it cuts some corners ("You saw Dog Day Afternoon," the top cop unwisely raises a close point of comparison), and it uses every ounce of its cleverness simply to avoid difficult choices. Lee, too, appears anxious to stay out of trouble. He tosses off a parody of violent video games (Kill Dat Nigra), and shows some sensitivity to racial profiling (post-9/11, in particular), but his primary target has been selected for unanimity: Nazis and their collaborators. His direction of the essentially static action is ostentatiously busy. And yes, he remembers to roll out his trademark dolly at one point to give a lift to the riled hero: hell, literally, on wheels. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd