MONTY Brogan is dreading the 25th hour, when his seven-year stretch for possession of Class A drugs will begin.

In the latest "Spike Lee joint", adapted by David Benioff from his own contemplative novel, convicted drug dealer Monty (Edward Norton) has 24 hours of New York freedom to prepare himself for the prison ordeal. 24 hours to find someone to blame for his predicament; anyone but himself or his dog. 24 hours to reflect on the shame of his wastrel years after the sporting glory of his youth.

Only two people knew where he kept his stash of cash and drugs, yet he cannot be sure whether his Puerto Rican girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson) grassed him up.

His best mates, English tutor Jacob (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and Wall Street trader Slaughtery (Barry Pepper), take him out on the town - Naturelle turns up too in his favourite slinky silver number - to cheer him up but Monty is an enervated soul. What's more, Jacob and Slaughtery have issues of their own.

Jacob and Slaughtery are full of feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, whereas Monty espouses a hatred of all cultures and communities around him in a memorably splenetic scene staring at himself in a nightclub mirror. Such vitriol has not been seen since Michael Douglas's outbursts in Joel Schumacher's Falling Down in 1992.

Edward Norton talks of 25th Hour as "a movie about loss, consequences, choices and taking things for granted", an apt summary of a dark journey into the human soul.

There is a sense of fragility and shredded nerves, enhanced by 25th Hour being filmed in the aftermath of September 11. Here is the first movie to feature Ground Zero after the attack on the World Trade Centre, as Slaughtery looks out from his Manhattan high-rise to the spot-lit ground below.

As Monty's personal quest for redemption mirrors a city's struggle to make sense of cataclysmic events and then move forward, so Spike Lee taps into the rhythm and feeling of New York once more, aided by grainy digital video filming and more character nuance than usual. No one, not even Woody Allen, does New York better than Lee.

Even if Norton does not have the pretty face that Monty so fears being abused in jail, he is in every other way right for this fallen, troubled anti-hero with his pathos and bottled anger.

When the 25th hour approaches, hope peeps over the horizon at last in a closing dream sequence where Monty has an alternative, peaceful future for himself and Naturelle.

Has Spike Lee gone soft?

Updated: 10:30 Friday, April 25, 2003