Filling out 135 minutes worth of screen time, Benioff’s tale sends Norton out on a night-long journey through Manhattan with two childhood bros (an insufferable Barry Pepper as an aggro finance guy, and a self-parodic Philip Seymour Hoffman as a loser teacher with a crush on his underage student), occasionally intersecting with Rosario Dawson’s girlfriend character - the love of his life, if he could only trust that she didn’t snitch on him! Pure macho melodrama, the central trio’s One Last Party naturally evolves into a spiritually transformative event for all involved, forcing each man to face their complicity in their own misery.įaux-profound, like a straight-faced Fight Club, one might wager that 25th Hour would not hold fast to its stellar rep were it not for the film’s proximity to the events of, its theatrical run kicking off just 15 months after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Working off a fairly clever premise that has Edward Norton as a mid-level drug dealer wrestling with his past and future in the 24 hours leading up to his imprisonment, the ingenuity of eventual Game of Thrones co-showrunner Benioff’s writing begins and ends with this structural decision. Something of a rarity in his career, Lee has very few directing credits to his name that aren’t also joined by a writing credit (worth noting that the aforementioned Inside Man is another such exception), and while the material translates to his stylistic preferences just fine, the writing is noticeably crasser and more self-important than what one expects from a 40 Acres production. Obviously, formally a product of Lee’s imagination, 25th Hour otherwise lacks the filmmaker’s iconic voice, the project clearly being steered by sole screenwriter David Benioff, whose screenplay is an adaptation of his own novel (technically titled The 25th Hour ). These movies are everything that 25th Hour is not: risky, fraught, confrontational, formally experimental, etc., and they were also critical and commercial failures, Bamboozled having only been recently vindicated. In regards to its sustained popularity, it’s hard not to see the assertion (by the predominantly white media apparatus) that this film is Lee’s finest accomplishment in an uncharitable light, particularly when one takes into account that it’s sandwiched between two of the more exciting features in his filmography - Bamboozled and She Hate Me. Attitudes and perceptions have shifted some in the years following 2015’s Chi-Raq and Lee’s subsequent reemergence as an awards contender, but also not really: the substantial amount of work he produced in the wake of 25th Hour remains largely unacknowledged or passively dismissed, while this film’s reputation hasn’t particularly diminished. For some time, and even still, the accepted critical narrative regarding Spike Lee’s 25th Hour positioned the film as one of the significant peaks in his body of work, if not the greatest, and, up until recently, his last project of note (give or take Inside Man ).
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