25TH HOUR (2002). If it's to director Spike Lee that this film owes its crudeness, unevenness, and stridency, it's also to him that it owes much of its emotional force. Based on the novel by David Beniff (who did the adaptation), the story unfolds on the last day before Monty (Edward Norton), a successful drug dealer who's been caught by the DEA, must report to prison to serve a seven-year sentence. Much of the dialogue consists of avoidance maneuvers by which Monty and those close to him -- his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), his father (Brian Cox), and his two best friends, Frank (Barry Pepper) and Jake (Philip Seymour Hoffman) -- circle around the hopeless reality. The film is immersed in Manhattan skyline. Lee takes us on a tour of Manhattan multiculturalism: Monty visits his dad's "Irish" bar, mixes with Russian and Ukrainian gangsters, and has a Puerto Rican girlfriend. But that leads to a disastrous long rant in which Monty says "Fuck you" to everything that bothers him about New York: Pakistani cab drivers, Korean grocers, gay men, and so on, each target appearing on cue in a montage of snapshots of stereotypes. The use of Ground Zero as a backdrop for Frank and Jake's bad faux improvised dialogue is insulting, and so is the unctuous, overwritten encomium on rural America, recited by Brian Cox as if he were narrating a Chrysler industrial, that mars the conclusion. But there are some fine performances, especially Norton's, and the terrible energy of the theme of Monty's last night of freedom charges the atmosphere of a long sequence in a nightclub where the sense of pleasure in spending time is set against the haunting awareness that time is being wasted. It's the heart of the film, and all by itself it justifies 25th Hour. (134m)

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