Spike clocks in at 9/11

Only 24 hours left of liberty. Then, who knows? Rape instead of rehab, most likely, in an up-state New York prison. As Dr Johnson remarked of a fate not dissimilar to Edward Norton's in 25th Hour: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Monty Brogan, a convicted drugs dealer, has rather less time to review his misspent life, and imagine his future, before he begins a seven-year sentence.

I wish director Spike Lee had taken the word "concentrates" more to heart. That extra hour in the title seems never-ending; it often happens this way in films that set an expiration date on a character's life, liberty or even chastity.

Nevertheless, director and star are well matched here. Lee is an angry talent. Even with an almost all-white cast, giving him more moral and social options than his usual black crowd, he allows his own racial roots that are embedded in the slave era of American history to surface in some textual surprises.

There is a long, scalding tirade against every ethnic faction in New York City delivered by Norton. With corrosive bitterness, he addresses his own reflection in a bar-room mirror that is inscribed, unnecessarily, with a "F*** You" graffiti. It's a knock-out moment of love-hatred: maybe calculated to rival De Niro's "You lookin' at me?" soliloquy in Taxi Driver.

Norton is a self-punishing kind of actor. Fight Club and American History X showed him to be the most passionate screen masochist since Marlon Brando, himself a star who repeatedly beat hell out of a talent he had come to despise by seeking or accepting roles that mortified his flesh with pain. "I suffer, therefore I am," is the creed of both these stars.

Near the end of 25th Hour, terrified of what awaits him in jail, Monty begs one of his best pals to destroy his pretty-boy looks - make him a less attractive target. It is the sort of self-loathing epiphany that would have drawn the young Brando to a script in which he could smell blood. Norton's role, however, needs such portentous inflation.

Physically, Monty is a runt compared with some of the hard men in the story. The son of a one-time firefighter (Brian Cox), he is a scholarship drop-out who was expelled for selling weed to his classmates, then found graft more useful than grades for acquiring a comfortable pad and the Puerto Rican girlfriend (Rosario Dawson) who may, or may not, have sold him out to the DEA.

As he waits out the hours to report to the penitentiary, he revisits his widower dad and two pals from schooldays, both of them also in mid-life crisis.

Jacob is a Jew who has come down in the world, teaches English to uncaring kids and is filled with professional selfloathing as well as lust for an under-age student (Anna Paquin) with a tattooed navel and a promiscuous manner. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays him with his customary skill at suggesting a chronic case of bad breath.

Barry Pepper is Francis Xavier Slaughtery, Monty's other buddy, a Wall Street bond trader whose apartment is as bare as his soul, but who possesses an overkill mind-set. Both parts are more showy - and more interesting - than Norton's, though he holds his own with a broody lonesomeness in a film that is relentlessly melancholic.