Revisiting 25th Hour (2002)

Is this movie actually good?

I have a weird relationship to the movie 25th Hour (2002). I think a lot of people do. I wanted to watch it again because I wasn’t sure what my opinion of it was. I know I saw it like 15 years ago and I don’t really remember anything about it. Periodically I’ve thought about the movie and about how it’s generally regarded as being pretty high up in the pantheon of Edward Norton movies, and Spike Lee movies—and how if you ever talk movies with people and it comes up they’ll be like “oh yeah, great movie,” but they never really say why. It kind of occupies this weird location where it flies under the radar, but when it does pop up, people say, oh it’s great what a classic…but they don’t even really know why. So it’s kind of underrated and overrated at the same time in this weird way.

In skimming reviews for it on Rotten Tomatoes, some of them say that it’s Spike Lee’s best movie—better even than Do The Right Thing, the movie that sort of cemented his reputation as a so-called great filmmaker. (I never thought any of his movies were very good. I guess Malcolm X and Inside Man are okay but only because Denzel is in them).

But 25th Hour is interesting because if you didn’t know it was a Spike Lee “joint” (as he annoyingly calls his movies for some reason) you wouldn’t be able to tell. It doesn’t have any of his style to it really. (Does Spike Lee even have a style? Just being an obnoxious New Yorker basically? I don’t know. Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen are New York filmmakers, but they have an actual style beyond just being New York guys. There’s a really stupid line at the end of 25th Hour where someone says the phrase “you’re a New Yorker in your bones!” and that just seems very Spike Lee to me—just the dumbest possible way of being a New Yorker. There’s nothing deep or profound about being a New Yorker—it isn’t something that permeates your bones! It’s all just by accident, transplants pretending to know what they’re doing, or locals who have unreasonable and undeserved “pride” for never leaving a neighborhood that consists of just sidewalks and shitty coffee shops. Scorsese captures the real New York—brutal sociopaths who grin and laugh one minute and stomp your brains out the next. Even Woody Allen, with his neurotic characters, captures a reality of New York. Spike Lee just operates at the lowest common denominator “Eyyy I’m walkin heere!” level—and doesn’t even comment on that in an interesting way. Just so basic and unreflective while being so self-satisfied. There’s one scene that is just extended closeups of Ground Zero, showing construction workers and trucks clearing out the rubble, even a year or more after the 9/11 attacks. And it doesn’t relate to the content of the scenes before or after it—it’s just images of Ground Zero, as if that is self-evidently substantial and all-encompassing and relates to everything. Wow, Ground Zero…this says a lot about our society, man. Think about it dude. There’s even some really obnoxious like chanting music set over it. It’s trying really hard to say something but it’s just images of Ground Zero. It has nothing to do with the themes of the film, but it was released like a year after 9/11 so you kind of had to put them in there I guess, and people were just sort of obliged to be like wow that’s deep, dude).

But mostly it isn’t directed with any distinctiveness at all. There’s like one little bit where he does something kind of self-indulgent and self-consciously Famous Director-ish in the scene with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the nightclub, but other than that, it’s kind of just workmanlike and anonymous. It sort of feels like Spike Lee is trying to copy Boogie Nights in that bit a little. But mostly he gets out of the way in this movie and lets the actors shine (wise decision, because the cast in this thing is unbelievably good—way better than the movie deserved).

The cast is stuck with an absolutely atrocious story and cringey dialogue. I didn’t realize that it was written by David Benioff (one of the guys who wrote the Game of Thrones show on HBO). Very punchable face in my opinion. Apparently it was based on his debut novel in 2001, which somehow Tobey Maguire got a hold of (even though it was just written for Benioff’s final thesis project in his Master’s degree in creative writing. Weird). Benioff comes from elite circles (his Dad was the former head of Goldman Sachs!), so I guess that helped his shitty novel find its way to Tobey Maguire (who, by the way, Spider-Man nostalgia aside, seems like kind of a dumb bro who has bad taste). According to his Wikipedia, Benioff grew up in the richest enclaves of Manhattan, so his attempt to write about a seedy Brooklyn drug dealer is about as tone deaf as you’d expect! So Benioff wrote an awful novel in 2001 and in 2002 it was instantly made into a movie starring Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Cox, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, and Barry Pepper. (Anna Paquin and Barry Pepper were a big deal 20 years ago). Norton, Hoffman, and Cox are all-time greats in my opinion. And Rosario Dawson is always great and has never been hotter than she is in this movie. Her character in this movie is named Naturelle Riviera…a name that is almost as bad as Norton’s character (Monty Brogan!).

The story doesn’t really make any sense at all. Norton plays Monty Brogan (such a stupid name!), a Brooklyn drug dealer who gets “touched up” (meaning caught) before the movie starts. The film takes place almost entirely in the day before he has to go to prison for seven years for drug dealing. (I don’t think they ever say which drugs…I guess heroin? In an early scene, Brogan is sitting on a bench by himself and a former customer comes up to him telling him how he needs some drugs, mannnn…he’s having bad withdrawals, like not the kind you get from cocaine. Must be heroin? But nobody really did much heroin in New York back then, or now. I don’t know. This scene is stupid. Brogan tells the junkie that he’s retired because he got “touched up” and tells him to go to “110th street” for his drugs. I think Benioff included that because there’s a cool 70s movie called Across 110th Street about drug dealing in Harlem. And the junkie says mannn I can’t go up there! If the “yos” get one look at me I’ll be finished! Who calls black people “yos”? It isn’t even offensive it’s just so cringe. This movie is full of lines like that. Benioff is such an incredibly terrible writer. It’s so surreal seeing this amazing cast of actors saying his laughably incompetent lines).

Anyway, back to how the plot doesn’t make much sense…I guess if you pay your bail they let you just hang out until you have to report to prison…seems pretty obvious that you could just leave the state and/or country instead of dutifully going to jail at the predetermined date, no? And pretty early in the movie, after it’s established that he is going to prison for seven years the next day, a bunch of DEA agents show up at his apartment and find some drugs in his couch. Then a few scenes later they interrogate him at the police station and he refuses to “play ball” and give up his sources…and they tell him he’ll get 3-8 years? So he was already going to prison for seven years for drugs, they found more drugs the day before he is going to prison, and they don’t really add any time to his sentence? I don’t know man. It’s all really stupid.

I can’t emphasize enough how cringe the dialogue from David Benioff is. It almost feels like the actors are doing him some kind of weird charity favor by saying his dogshit lines. After this movie he got handed the job of writing Troy (2004), the Brad Pitt movie about ancient Greece, which I think was pretty poorly received. Then he wrote the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie, which is universally regarded as the single worst comic book movie ever made. Then he got Game of Thrones (which he fucked up horribly at the end when he didn’t have the books to guide him any more).

The plot is basically just Edward Norton hanging out with his lifelong childhood friends, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper. But you don’t really buy that he’s lifelong friends with them. They’re supposed to have all his history together but you don’t feel it at all in their scenes together. The actors do their best, and they’re great, and that’s the only thing that saved the movie. But there’s just nothing between these characters and, it makes no sense that they’re friends. Nothing is more annoying than characters who have no chemistry and who talk about how much history and love they have for each other. Just so unearned.

Now, having said all that, I’m glad it exists, and I enjoyed watching it. It’s very maximalist in a weird way—it’s well over two hours long, and there’s so much stupid shit in it, and it all gets played totally seriously by the talented cast. They seem to want to try to impress Spike Lee, who was still considered cool and serious back then. Even though the material they’re working with is like an 8th grader’s idea of what a badass novel would be, they do their damndest. It’s just insane that a movie so bad could get made with such big stars, and with a big budget. It has nothing to say—it has no perspective at all. And yet, it says a lot in a way, because it’s very much of its time. It could only have been made in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when moviemaking was enjoying a weird kind of renaissance. There’s something kind of inspiring about how so much talent and energy could be put into making something that was so bad—which I guess still happens today, but only with sequels and Marvel shit and so on. This was a movie totally about humanity, but very incompetent, yet nevertheless made in the most high scale Hollywood way possible. A big big swing and a miss, but even the misses from twenty years ago were interesting, because they tell you a lot about the world.