You'll hate this unless you - like Spike - think we deserved 9/11.

Barry Pepper's entire speech about how Monte deserves his sentence (because, despite being a nice guy, he really really did profit from the misery of others!) is the explanation for all of the 9/11 imagery in this 'joint'. It seems like all the hater posts on IMDb bring up that scene, and mention how pointless and cheap it was to use the WTC site in the background... well, it wasn't pointless. Good directors have a reason for everything, and Lee's reason is that Pepper was really talking about how America deserved 9/11.

Everyone should already be aware that Spike Lee is a ignorant, racist jerk, to put it mildly (if you're not aware of that, you haven't done your homework). But the bait-and-switch tactic of putting his own brand of sociopathic America-hating agitprop in a movie which is ostensibly about a guy going to prison makes Lee a real scumbag - since he abuses your trust and does NOT intend to entertain you - and it pushed this movie past simply BAD and into ABOMINABLE.

You should know that I continued watching after that scene with Pepper and Hoffman. I stuck through the pointless, jarring, out-of-place "F YOU" diatribe.... and gave the film 15 more minutes. But even after 45 minutes, this awful excuse for a story still had ZERO character development, ZERO direction and gave me ZERO reason to care about anything happening onscreen. What a waste of time.


The Doctor is out. Far out.