25th Hour
Synopsis: A man meets with friends and family in his last day of freedom before serving a seven year jail term for drug dealing.
Technical Details
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Review
Monty Brogan has one day left of freedom. He has been convicted to seven years of prison for dealing drugs and his sentence begins the following day. In this last day in New York he will meet his father, and he will spend the night at a club with his girlfriend Naturelle and childhood friends Jacob and Frank. At the club he will also run into the mobsters he worked with, who have doubts about what Monty may have told the police.
The problem I have with this movie is that it never shows Monty dealing drugs, we are simply asked to believe he was a drug dealer. But this is a guy who has a good and caring father, has a stable relationship with his girlfriend and does not seem to have a bit of violence in him. One day he found a hurt dog left to die in the middle of the road and he rescued the poor animal, later becoming his owner. Can this man be a drug dealer? Everything is possible I guess, but it isn’t easy to picture him like that.
Director Spike Lee also inserted a few of his signature shots and themes, and one in particular, a long discussion about the terrorist attacks of September 11 between Monty’s friends Frank and Jacob while looking at Ground Zero from Frank’s apartment window, has no relation with the story and seems completely out of place. The ending of this film deserves a mention, I don’t want to give it away, so I’m just going to say that most of the film plays in a kind of slow and monotonous pace, but as the film is reaching a conclusion there are a few interesting developments that raise the bar and give you a glimpse of how good this film could have been.
©2008 by Miguel Grinberg
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