Inside Man (part three)

Back inside the police van, Darius is smoking, and wearily wondering: ‘How dumb do these morons have to be to think they’re gonna get a plane?’ Keith has become a great champion of Dalton’s and points out that he is ‘no moron’ but Darius is thinking on a more macro level. ‘I don’t just mean him. Any hostage taker. Those ragheads at the Munich Olympics. Who the f*** ever got a plane?’ These un-PC ramblings seem to give Keith an idea and he picks up the phone. ‘He wants a plane. I’m gonna give him a plane.’ Mitch is bewildered but Keith’s reasoning is sound. ‘This whole time, we’re trying to stall him, right? Wrong. They’re the ones that are stalling. The b******t questions, the Albanian thing … He wants to give us more time. He makes demands. He gives us deadlines. We stall. Then he gives us more time. I don’t think he’s in a rush.’ Mitch remains flummoxed.

Dalton answers the phone and Keith tells me him the plane is ready to go. But before they can get down to the brass tacks of in-flight entertainment and meat-free meals for any vegetarian passengers, Keith’s gonna ‘need to come in there and make sure the hostages are okay’. Dalton says Keith can have a gander at them when they ‘get on the bus’ but that’s not good enough: ‘I just need to make sure you’re not leaving any bodies behind’. Dalton thinks it over, then agrees to meet him at the front door. Mitch thinks Keith is ‘crazy to go in there’.

Keith arrives and is frisked down. You wouldn’t have thought a bank populated by gun-toting potential psychopaths would get a huge number of voluntary visitors but this place is busier than Clapham Junction at rush hour. Dalton, ever the gracious host, walks Keith around the premises, though he’ll definitely compromise his future as a tour guide if he insists on continually pointing a gun at the visitors. He goes back into credit by offering Keith some gum but our hero is not a man to waste time masticating when there are hostages to inspect. Dalton shows him into one of the rooms where the captives are sitting on the floor, and we hear a woman crying, a dubious touch considering they’ve been there for hours and even the most tremulous of the hostages might have been expected to be showing a modicum of stoicism by now. On the other hand, Keith’s tie is pretty shocking so maybe that has set her off. Dalton shows Keith the other hostage-filled rooms. More muffled crying. This is all well and good but the bank is very dark, what with it now being night time, and it’s not like Dalton is showing Keith every nook and cranny. If he was going to ‘leave a body behind’ he could just bung it in a cupboard or something. Anyway, they come across Brian, not playing violent computer games for once, and Keith asks for his release. Dalton declines. Keith wants to know if he’s seen the lot, hostage-wise. ‘There are some who misbehaved.’ They go into yet another room where these trouble-making hostages have been gagged. Upon Keith’s arrival they all start whimpering in truly ludicrous fashion. Keith promises he will ‘get you all out of here’.

‘Tour is over’ Dalton announces, which Keith takes to mean that it’s time for a little Q&A. ‘What were you planning on doing if you actually got the plane and the pilots, huh?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘You don’t want a plane. You never did … You saw ‘Dog Day Afternoon’. You’re stalling. Why? I don’t know. What’s the matter? You can’t get into the safe?’ ‘Perhaps.’ If Keith had stopped after ‘You’re stalling,’ he might have given Dalton a moment of worry, but instead he blunders on, admitting he’s still, essentially, pissing in the wind, and asking daft questions which Dalton can answer enigmatically. Even worse, he then opts for the old ‘there’s two ways out of this,’ standby. ‘The easy way, we walk out the front door together, or the hard boys cut the power, hit you with the tear gas, and come in strong through the glass. It’s your choice. You don’t want that. I don’t want that.’ Again with the ‘we want the same thing’ rubbish! Yes, after all the trouble he’s gone to, Dalton ‘wants to’ throw his hands up, forget any thoughts of improving his financial situation, and peaceably submit to a few years in prison. Keith presses on: ‘They’d like to do it tonight. You got night vision? You got gas masks?’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘I’m this close to ordering it.’ Unfortunately, as usual, Dalton is miles ahead of the game. ‘First, you don’t order an assault when no hostages have been killed and there’s no immediate threat. Second, if it ends that way, whatever happens, you don’t get to be the hero. You want to b******t me, try harder. Let’s go.’ Keith briefly ponders a riposte but realises he’s been taken to the cleaners yet again and equably gives his assent.

However, en route to the door, he tries another tack: ‘I tell you what. My ass is covered, sport. But I would not get too comfortable in here if I were you.’ Dalton is unruffled. ‘No? I got the cable guy coming on Wednesday.’ Keith laughs. ‘Why don’t you just walk out the door?’ ‘I will. I’m gonna walk out of that door when I’m good and ready.’ Keith quickly switches into car salesman mode, ‘Can I get you to do that today?’ but is met with silence. However, Dalton is surprisingly keen to continue the discussion and asks if Keith has ‘any other proposals?’ Even more inexplicably, Keith takes that as his cue to start moaning about his personal life. ‘Oh, please. Do not say ‘proposals’. My girlfriend, she wants a proposal from me.’ ‘You think you’re too young to get married?’ ‘No, I’m not too young. Too broke. Maybe I should rob a bank.’ Incredibly, Dalton wants to know more. I understand that he’s playing for time but feigning interest in the love life of this buffoon is well beyond the call of duty. ‘You love each other?’ ‘Yeah. Yeah, we do.’ ‘Then money shouldn’t really matter.’ ‘Thank you, bank robber.’ Exactly Keith! Dalton may be quick to hand out the old chewing gum (and he’s great with kids!) but he’s putting dozens of people through a terrifying, emotionally-scarring experience, solely to enrich himself. Yet he still has the chutzpah to claim money shouldn’t ‘really’ matter when it comes to affairs of the heart. And he carries on! ‘I’m just saying money can’t buy love.’ Keith is enormously grateful for the advice and is eager to hear more. ‘Why don’t we go across the street to the Killarney Rose, huh? Forget about this dangerous hostage situation. I’ll buy you a beer. My treat.’ Dalton doesn’t fancy it. ‘I’m trying to stay away from bars, if you know what I mean.’ That’s the lamest pun I’ve ever heard. It has to be said that this new loquacious Dalton is a bit of a prat. Keith agrees, offers his hand and, when Dalton takes it, he attacks. The pair roll down the stairs locked in combat but Keith STILL won’t quit with the annoying questions. ‘Cellblock or the graveyard?’ he enquires as they grapple. ‘Prison whites or a toe tag? Make up your mind. Tick tock, tick tock.’ Dalton keeps his masked face away from Keith’s prying hands and Steve or Steve-O arrives gun in hand to end their combat. ‘You just crossed the f*****g line,’ Dalton informs Keith, thrusting his gun towards him. ‘Buses, Kojak, parked outside. You think I’m bluffing? You roll the dice and see what happens.’ Keith takes his leave, probably wondering what bluff Dalton was referring to, considering he didn’t actually make any specific threat.

Outside, Mitch hustles up to Keith, eager for details. Keith has ‘got him right where I want him’. ‘Yeah? Where’s that?’ ‘Right behind me with my pants around my ankles but it’s a start.’ How lovely. Mitch has been on subsistence rations as far as getting good lines goes since the start of the film but his pickings have got really slim of late. All he does nowadays is squawk inane questions and murmur clichés. To whit, he mutters ‘Jesus Christ’ at this latest development and the pair march off.

Inside the room of the bank where Dalton’s Dynamos have dug a big hole , Steve or Steve-O articulately expresses his mounting disquiet at the way Dalton is conducting operations: ‘What the f*** man?’ Dalton wants to know ‘how long’ something is going to take. The Steve or Steve-O who isn’t haranguing Dalton (‘He got the drop on you. What if he saw your face? You know, you’re letting this cop get too f*****g close.’) says it will take ‘two, maybe three hours’.

Keith is inside the van giving Darius chapter and verse. ‘I gave him every excuse to blow my brains out. He doesn’t bite. Why? He ain’t the type.’ After briefly recapping the events of the day, Keith offers this analysis: ‘He’s up to something but it ain’t violence.’ Brilliant. (‘Keith, Keith. Some guy has broken into a bank and taken everybody inside hostage. What do you think?’ ‘Hmmmm. He’s up to something.’) Dalton checks in on the blower and tells Keith to use the camera on the truck to ‘give (him) a close-up on the second-floor window’. Rourke does the honours. Dalton waves to the camera then guns down a hostage with a sheet over his or her head. How ironic, Keith had just been banging on about how Dalton wasn’t the type for violence! I don’t think I’ve ever spotted a plot twist in my entire life but even I didn’t believe for a second that that was a real hostage. Nonetheless, Keith and Mitch are appalled and the former heads for the bank, via quite a memorable tracking shot which shows just the top half of his body moving along determinedly while chaos unravels behind him.

Dalton has made it downstairs in time to be calmly waiting for Keith at the door of the bank. Keith is not quite as relaxed: ‘What are you doing? What the f*** are you doing?’ ‘You mean beyond the obvious?’ ‘That’s what I mean. Come on, this ain’t no bank robbery (this ain’t no disco!’ - Talking Heads).’ Dalton is looking for a scapegoat. ‘This is your fault. I told you to get the buses.’ ‘F*** you! I didn’t kill anybody.’ Previously the pair have been yelling through the door at each other but Dalton now pops his head out. ‘I got 50 more people in here. You f*** with me again, I’ll give you two of the longest days of your life.’ Keith’s not looking to make trouble. ‘Just tell me what it is you really want and I’ll get it for you.’ ‘I’ve told you. Two buses, a plane,’ says Dalton in bored tones. ‘And box seats behind home plate at Yankee Stadium,’ jokes Keith, who has quickly recovered his equilibrium after watching someone get shot in cold blood on his watch. ‘Don’t b******t a b********er,’ he adds. ‘You planned every inch of this thing right from the start. You got everybody marching to your beat, including me, and I’m through buying it.’ Dalton is impressed. ‘You’re too damn smart to be a cop,’ he remarks. ‘Now get the f*** out of here.’ A creature of habit, he pulls out his gun to ensure speedy obedience. Keith embarks on a dangerous, and pretty pointless, game of ‘Call my Bluff’: ‘What? You going to shoot me? Do it. S***, you got nothing to lose. I damn sure ain’t got nothing to lose, so shoot me. Do it. Shoot me.’ ‘F*** you. Tell them to send someone sane over here.’ Dalton heads back inside.

Darius is on the phone, informing someone ‘we got a big problem’.

‘Hey, Detective, this ain’t your day,’ a random cop informs Keith. Cheers mate! Captain Coughlin has turned up and Keith heads over in penitent mood. ‘Look, I know you put your trust in me and I just …’ ‘Well, you’re a good cop. Frazier, I need more like you. But if you’re going down on this one, I can’t go with you.’ Keith starts trying to explain but Cap doesn’t want to hear it. ‘I go to bed, everything’s hunky-dory. I get a call at 3:15 and there’s what? A dead hostage.’ It’s a strange mind that considers it hunky-dory for a gang of armed robbers to be holding 50-odd people hostage, but we should probably have guessed old Cap wasn’t playing with a full deck when he classed Keith ‘I don’t know a digital transmitter from my elbow’ Frazier as a ‘good cop’. Keith is adamant he can ‘end this’ but it’s too late. ‘I got to answer to the Chief of D’s,’ Cap points out. ‘Darius is calling the shots on this. That’s it.’ Darius? John ‘call a raghead a raghead’ Darius? Cap really has lost his marbles. Keith nods imperceptibly, Cap wanders off. Keith goes over to Mitch, who asks: ‘What’d he say?’ ‘That’s it,’ Keith replies dejectedly. ‘S**t,’ says Mitch in annoyance, and walks off! I promise I won’t mention this again but I don’t think Mitch has had a line with more than three words in it for about half an hour.

Inside the van, Darius, Coughlin and some cops are planning to assault the bank. I doubt Dalton and the Steves are quaking in their boots at the prospect. Darius has a schematic of the building and doesn’t like what he sees. There’s only one entrance and ‘then we got to make it up the stairs blind. Once we get up there, we’re right out in the open. They have the advantage of cover, they can pick us off like sitting ducks. (While he waxes pessimistic we see footage of this putative attack playing out.) Then if we make it across the floor and down the stairs, we still can’t tell the homies (?) from the good guys until they shoot at us’. Darius seems to have captured the consensus because another cop chimes in: ‘Even if it isn’t rigged with explosives, it’s still a f*****g nightmare.’ We cut to more shots of the would-be attack: hostages screaming, gunplay, one of the ‘homies’ is shot. We cut back to the van, where a moustachioed gent points out, ‘And let’s not forget the possibility of hostages being killed.’ We see one of the robbers being shot as he tries to use a hostage as a human shield. Darius weighs in again: ‘Well, our best hope is to separate them from the hostages. If we can get two or three upstairs and take them out?’ ‘Kill them,’ says Coughlin. Footage of that scenario being played out. One of the plotters (possibly Coughlin again) plays devil’s advocate: ‘What if there’s more than four?’ Back to Darius: ‘That’s what’s so nuts about it. Anybody in a painter’s suit could be a perp.’ A cop in a bandana has an idea, ‘Maybe we should dress our guys up like a bunch of painters’. Come off it mate, this is a serious business, not some Whitehall farce! No one shouts him down though, and earlier random cop adds: ‘And we should use rubber bullets. Take head shots. Put their lights out.’ ‘This all sounds too complicated for me,’ says Coughlin reaching for the door and shouting, ‘Keith, Mitch, come out of the diner, you’re back on the team.’ Not really. Despite all the negatives, you know he’s going to order the attack anyway. In reality, the camera now switches position to show us that Ren and Stimpy have actually been sitting there the whole time, quietly listening and looking exceedingly grim. ‘Rubber bullets it is baby,’ says Coughlin. That’s easy for him to say, I highly doubt he’ll be putting his ample backside anywhere near the line of fire.

Sitting with Keith, Mitch gets his longest line for hours, but sadly it’s not good tidings. ‘If this goes down wrong they’re going to dump this whole mess in your lap, you know?’ I’m not sure that would be the case and Keith thinks otherwise too: ‘I’m making first grade.’ Mitch reverts to type: ‘What?’ ‘I’m making Detective First Grade. Things ain’t all they appear to be.’ Mitch is outraged as Keith explains how ‘the Mayor and our mystery guest’ can be thanked for his wholly undeserved promotion, which, by the way, I don’t remember being in any way definitively agreed. ‘Everybody’s getting theirs. I’m gonna get mine,’ is Keith’s justification. ‘I’ll be outside’. He leaves so Mitch closes his eyes, put his head back and amuses himself thinking of ways to murder Keith. Either that or he takes his trite remarks quota into three figures for the film by musing ‘What a day, what a day.’

Miles out of the loop and with time on his hands, Keith chats to a sympathetic Collins outside. Keith wants to know more about the time Collins was menaced by a 12-year-old with a gun. ‘Last year, up in the 33rd,’ says Collins. ‘I was breaking up a fight about a half a block from the high school. This one little spic is getting his clock cleaned by another one.’ Right-on Keith tells him to ‘tone down the colour commentary,’ although he’s been letting Darius get away with similar all day. Collins looks pissed off but continues, ‘So I bust up the fight, I turn around and this kid is pointing a .22 at my chest.’ ‘Which kid was this?’ asks Keith. ‘Another kid, an … African-American.’ ‘An African-American, right?’ ‘Came out of nowhere. I didn’t see him.’ The upshot is that Collins got ‘shot in the f*****g chest’. Riled, he continues, ‘So you’ll pardon my euphemisms Detective, but I would rather wind up an old bigot than a handsome young corpse. (Keith finds this hilarious.) Now, no offence Detective, but I’m just trying to keep them away from us (?). Now, what do you say we just get these people safely out of the bank?’ ‘I hear that.’ ‘And I’ll try and watch what I say in the future. You never know who’s listening.’ Keith looks overly serious. Well, I think we all learnt something from that conversation … namely that if film-makers deleted pointless, extraneous scenes, we’d all be rewarded with leaner, better movies. Unfortunately, they all want their ‘pictures’ to clock in at around two hours, so we are subjected to Collins’s homespun wisdom.

That said, Collins’s odd remark about how ‘you never know who’s listening’ has given Keith an idea. We find him again on his own inside the van, trying to dismantle the suitcase-type thing scrawled with Dalton’s demands which old Vikram brought out earlier on. This is all perfectly believable. When bank robbers send out their instructions on unusual objects, it’s standard practice to just read the demands, then toss the object to one side, rather than examine it thoroughly in case there’s any evidence to be unearthed. Keith and Co don’t even seem to have brushed it for fingerprints. Nor have they even tried to open it, which proves to be an error of judgement because, when Keith does so, he uncovers an easily findable listening device. He throws it down in annoyance, as if this was a malign twist of fate rather than breathtaking incompetence.

‘Darius. Darius, don’t make a move!” Keith bawls into a radio. ‘It’s all f****d up!” Darius asks what he’s on about. ‘They heard everything we said in the M.C.C (ah, Mobile Command Centre! It would have been so much classier if I had called it that all this time, instead of simply ‘the van’). ‘What?’ says Darius, although Keith was speaking pretty clearly. ‘The drawer with the demands in it (and that’s what that thing was, this is a hugely informative 20 seconds). They heard everything we said … They bugged us!’ Mitch is running around in a panic by the way. I love the incredulous tones Keith uses to relay this information, as if sticking a bug in some drawer is the most Machiavellian feat of criminal cunning he’s ever encountered. Darius, idiotic to the last, rebuts this by saying, ‘No, no, no. I’m going in’ and we see Dalton sitting at a desk, calmly listening in. ‘Shit,’ he says, though even that’s strange, considering he presumably heard them planning this assault half an hour or so ago.

We briefly see Stevie, mask off (yes, it’s Miss ‘I violated Section 34 double-D?’ from earlier - everything is falling neatly into place) before she puts it back on and her and Dalton start lobbing smoke canisters around. ‘Get everyone together,’ he instructs so she bawls ‘Steve! Steve-O!’ while chucking a couple more gas canisters down a corridor. The boys duly come running. ‘They’re coming in,’ Dalton informs them. ‘Everybody good?’ They are indeed. They head off to get the hostages, who are herded out, screaming as usual. ‘Everybody up the f*****g stairs,’ shouts Dalton and the hostages charge. We move to a vantage point outside the bank and see an explosion within, before the doors swing open and, after a lengthy pause, the hostages begin to emerge, shouting ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’ No prizes for guessing how the police react. They start gunning them down! Yes, they’re only using rubber bullets and yes, they do know the robbers are also wearing painter’s gear, and yes, the emergence of the hostages onto the street is an unexpected development, to say the least, but wouldn’t you wait until you saw a weapon before starting to shoot people indiscriminately? Even more unbelievably, it’s Darius who sees sense and orders a cease fire, although he has to shout it about eight times before anyone obeys, though they must all be able to clearly hear him through their earpieces. I’ll say it once more, then forever hold my peace. This police unit as a whole, from the top dogs like Coughlin, Keith and Darius, to the lower-downs who delivered the pizzas, are the most inept ever portrayed on film (Drebbin and the Naked Gun gang not excluded). I think Collins is the only cop whose dignity remains intact.

The hostages raise their hands and pull their masks off while the police wade in and throw them to the floor. They slap on the handcuffs while Keith, Mitch and Darius look on. ‘Don’t take any chances,’ Darius tells his men. We see a distraught Nancy, who protests: ‘It wasn’t me! I’m not a criminal!’ and we also see Stevie and, I think, Steve and Steve-O, who have melded in with the hostages.

After further shouting, the ‘E.S.U. team’ lead the charge into the bank. It’s deserted, so Keith and Mitch head in behind them. The team go into the store room but find it ‘clear!’. Dalton has presumably ensconced himself in the hole underground. Keith approaches the team leader and asks about the dead hostage but there’s no sign of him or her. ‘If it ain’t here, you must’ve missed something,’ Darius insists but the team boss disagrees. ‘Maybe, but I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones moving around down here. Check this out (he walks towards the safe). They forgot to rob the joint.’ ‘Holy s**t,’ says laconic Mitch but Keith is far more interested in the fact his poorly-executed brinkmanship may not have cost any lives after all. ‘We’re still looking,’ TL continues, ‘but there are no bad guys, no booby traps, no tunnels (?), no damage.’ No tunnels, but a roomy underground den where the man behind all this is lying low until the dust settles. Would they really not have found him at some point? What about that laser-imaging thing where human bodies show up as red, wouldn’t that lead them to Dalton in a trice? ‘And nothing missing,’ points out Mitch, graciously given a three-word line by the screenplay writers. Keith is hacked off. ‘Great, great, great. We’ll put out a city-wide description for David f*****g Copperfield then huh?’ He marches aggressively over to the TL as he says this, begging to be laid out, but TL heroically restrains himself. ‘I’m not trying to tell you your jobs, Detectives, but unless they swam out through the toilets, whoever did this is upstairs sucking pavement.’ Keith realises he’s been a dick and pats TL on the back. ‘All right, good job.’ TL leaves but Darius spots the bags full of mobile phones. Keith empties them out, but before he can find the one with the best camera phone and start taking photos of Darius gurning around in the safe they are called away again. As he leaves, Keith barks ‘Collins (what’s he doing in there?). Grab a uniform (!), make a quick count of that money in there, all right?’ That’s a bank safe. A busy bank in the one of the busiest cities in the world. I don’t think any count of the money in there is going to be too ‘quick’, though Collins has only got himself to blame for needlessly hanging around. ‘Don’t let anybody get tempted, including you!’ is Keith’s parting shot. Nice to be trusted by your superiors.

Keith goes up to a couple of cops and asks what they’ve found. ‘You’re going to love this one. Toy guns.’ Keith is thrown one to examine. ‘Fake guns. You got to be kidding me.’ The only way Keith would know a replica gun from the real kind would be if he took aim at his own head, pulled the trigger and nothing happened, so he quickly tosses it to Darius, who has entered with Mitch. ‘As if it wasn’t weird enough already,’ observes Mitch, who continues to descend into self-parody. Over his radio, Darius is called to the ‘ladies room’. How embarrassing!

Keith and Mitch accompany him and they are handed a blood stained sheet and some sort of remote device. ‘We can stop looking for that body,’ says Darius, although him, Keith and Mitch haven’t really been looking for anything so much as standing around and waiting for others to do the dirty work. Mitch grins inanely at the wackiness of it all while Keith spells it all out. ‘Fake guns. Fake execution. Nobody goes home till we get everybody’s story.’ ‘But detective, the hostages all seemed a bit stressed out so we’ve let them go home,’ says one of the cops. ‘You didn’t need their names or anything did you?’ Of course not. Keith’s latest statement of the blindingly obvious is met with silence, and here comes yet another messenger. ‘Cap, we got something else in the storage room.’ I’m guessing it’s not a dishevelled, slightly-pissed off looking Dalton. Yet again, Keith and Mitch horn in on Darius’s action and they are shown …

… some bin bags on the floor of the storage room, filled with people’s clothes. Keith literally looks for a second, then asks where the men’s room is and races off, without even bothering to pass comment on this latest find.

It’s not been an all-time great day for the hostages, the innocent ones at least, who are still lying around on the road. A coach pulls up to take them to the police station and they are stood up and searched first. ‘Female hostages to be searched by female officers only,’ shouts a disembodied voice through a megaphone, which the subtitles claim is the ubiquitous Collins. He counted that loot pretty damn fast and, once more, what would he be doing calling the shots anyway? I think the subtitles may be in error. The hostages are photographed and asked for their names. It’s a bit of a melee and hard to tell what’s what but I believe Stevie claims her name is ‘Valerie Keepsake’. Peter Hammond and Chaim both make appearances, Nancy rails at some unfortunate cop: ‘f*****g c********r’, Steve (or Steve-O) keeps himself to himself and one of the bank security guards freaks out. ‘Get him on the bus,’ insists subtitled ‘Collins’. We pan down the bus, so we can examine battered, bruised and fatigued-looking hostages. Cheer up guys, it’ll be something to tell the grandkids.

Coughlin walks over to a desk where Keith is looking dejected. ‘This thing is a mess. They thought this one out, soup to nuts.’ Coughlin: ‘So, lay it out for me.’ Keith obliges, ‘We photograph everybody that came out of the bank. We sit them down, we question them, we show them the photos. Most of them can’t point to anybody that’s guilty of anything. We ask them if they could recognise anybody who was not one of the bad guys. Even if we considered someone as a possible suspect, there’s one or two or three other people that would rule them out. It’s like the thing never happened.’ ‘What about prints?’ ‘Everywhere. So what? All it shows is that these people were there.’ ‘Alibis?’ ‘Just about everyone. Even if their alibi was weak, a hostage would identify them as being one of the good guys.’ I take alibi to mean an ‘I couldn’t have been there because I was here and these people saw me’, type defence so that last exchange is odd. We know they were all present at the bank and Keith had already established that everyone had been identified by someone else as a hostage. Personally, I’m surprised the solution to ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ didn’t get an airing at this point (I won’t spell it out explicitly in case any readers are halfway through the book as we speak). Back to Coughlin. ‘Piors?’ ‘We got one employee who had some juvie stuff. One customer had … (Keith pauses to cough. He’s certainly no Jack Bauer. He goes to the toilet, he clears his throat, and, a harsher critic than me might add, he fails to get the job done.) an out-of-state warrant for child support. Another one had a couple of priors, G.L.A. mostly. Again, same problem. Plus, he was a f*****g idiot.’ ‘Bank cameras?’ says Coughlin, who is blatantly going through the motions. ‘Useless. I’m telling you they thought of everything. Almost…We haven’t found that .357 or the perp that was holding it.’ ‘If you did, there’d be no prints on it anyway. (Pause) Bury it.’ Keith can’t believe what he’s hearing, and is, for once, briefly lost for words. ‘Captain, this thing stinks to high hell. I mean, somebody did something here.’ ‘You got no robbery. No suspects. Nobody’s breathing down my neck to come up with answers. I’m not gonna breathe down yours. Bury it.’ Keith remains stupefied, ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’ ‘I promise you, I’ll find you guys more cases to solve.’ And New York’s criminal fraternity say a hearty three cheers to that. Cap, you can find him all the cases you want, but don’t stake your hopes for promotion on his success rate. Keith looks at him suspiciously but acquiesces and sidles off. ‘Oh, here’s something that you probably didn’t expect,’ Cap calls out. ‘They found that missing Madrugada money.’ ‘No s***.’ ‘You want to know where it was?’ ‘In my bank account?’ ‘No.’ ‘My summer house in Sag Harbour?’ ‘No (chuckling).’ ‘My wallet?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then, no. I don’t want to know.’ Pretty drab scene. We laugh at Mitch for his straight-man routine but he’s sorely missed when absent.

Here he is now though, and he’s in classic mid-season form! ‘This is b******t man.’ Mitch has got a massive bee in his bonnet about the fact that they’re still working on a case about which no one else gives a hoot. He then starts a diatribe about Keith’s ‘accusers’. ‘I say we go after them all, Keith, Michael Corleone style. ‘Michael Corleone, do you renounce Satan?’ ‘Yes, I renounce him.’’ Mitch makes daft gun-shooting noises. Luckily, Keith is paying him as much attention as usual, namely none whatsoever, and is studying the safety deposit box records. ‘There’s no 392... According to these records, it doesn’t exist. (That) Pinstriped, mayonnaise, lying m********r.’ I love a musical reference so I can’t resist pointing out how well that line would have fitted into ‘Give Me Some Truth’ by John Lennon. Mitch, who a minute ago was preaching violent revolution, points out that Coughlin said they should ‘move on’ but Keith is up and on the march.

Inside the courthouse, Keith talks to ‘Judge Pasqua,’ thanks him and says he’ll ‘pick it up tomorrow’. How do I know it was ‘Judge Pasqua’? Because Madeleine is back, she’s mysteriously at the courthouse herself and she’s as grating as ever. She wants to know what ‘business (Keith has)’ with the judge. ‘Police business.’ She wonders why he isn’t burying the case as instructed, so he explains that he’s got ‘a job to do, Miss White’. ‘And since when is your job more important than your career? Or did you forget our arrangement?’ ‘We didn’t have any arrangement.’ Madeleine flicks on her condescension switch: ‘Let me tell you how this works. You …’ but Keith’s finally had it up to here. ‘No, let me tell you how this works. You press here to record and you press here to play. (Keith is showing her a cassette player.)’ It plays back the conversation Keith had when he met Madeleine and the Mayor in the car, except this time we get to hear what was said after Keith had denied involvement in the ever-tedious Madrugada business. Mayor, smarmy: ‘We’d like to be in your corner on that.’ Keith, self-righteous: ‘In exchange for what? I mean, what, do you want me to do something unethical? I mean, no disrespect to the both of youse, but I don’t need you to be in my corner, Mr Mayor. Look, I’m innocent.’ Madeleine, threatening: ‘Innocent or guilty, you’re still going down.’ Mayor, authoritative: ‘Give Miss White whatever she needs, or your career is over. Done. Kaput.’ Not very Mayor-like language your honour! Keith stops the tape but Madeleine fails to see what he has proved. ‘So? You gave me what I wanted. Your career is blossoming and all is right with the world.’ Keith is nosey though, and wants to know what ‘Case (was) hiding’. ‘You know, there’s a famous saying by the Baron de Rothschild. ‘When there’s blood on the streets, buy property.’ I think Mr Case really took that sentiment to heart. But he is no different to half the Fortune 500. Let it go, Detective. You’re a good cop. The city needs you.’ Keith walks off down a spiral staircase, unimpressed. As am I, if that’s how Madeleine justifies working for Case. His motto was more: ‘If there’s blood on the streets, make friends with the guys causing it to be spilt’. The Baron’s version is pithier, I admit.

After a pleasant, Madeleine-free period, here she is once again. For some reason Case is having his hair cut in a room out back beyond the gent’s toilets but Madeleine breezily strolls through anyway, claiming she ‘(has) an appointment’. They greet each other in congenial fashion and she sits down, while Case, immaculately coiffed, gets rid of ‘Vincent’. ‘Detective Frazier turned out to be quite sharp,’ Madeleine reports. ‘But I just fast-tracked his career a little and he’s under control.’ We see a shot of Keith being given a framed certificate and looking at it quizzically. Well he might, I hear you all say! Case wants to know ‘about the envelope’. ‘Well, the gang leader is going to hang on to it, as an insurance policy to keep you from seeking revenge. Clearly, he has a very low opinion of you (said with a fair amount of relish).’ Case wonders why. ‘In a nutshell, (because) you got rich doing business with the Nazis during the Holocaust.’ Case admits it. ‘It was 60 years ago. I was young and ambitious. I saw a short path to success and I took it. I sold my soul. And I’ve been trying to buy it back ever since. But you and this mystery man, you have an understanding?’ ‘I think so. And he managed to get out of there with that envelope. If someday he comes back to blackmail you, well, you’ll pay him. And you’ll get it back. So, I guess that’s it.’ ‘I suppose so.’ ‘B******.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘He didn’t go through all that just to stick your envelope under his mattress. They left money untouched, Arthur. He had to have walked out of there with something else. There had to have been something in that box that was worth more to him than your envelope. You don’t have to tell me (that’s big of her). There’s only one thing it could be anyway … Diamonds.’ ‘And then there’s the ring,’ Case adds. ‘Cartier ring. It belonged to the wife of a Parisian banker. Wealthy family of French Jews. And when the war came along, the ring and everything else they owned was confiscated and they were shipped off to concentration camps. None survived. We were friends, I could have helped them. But the Nazis paid too well.’ Sorry for just transcribing that long conversation verbatim, without much commentary, but it’s so expositional to the plot that I thought it was justified. Case wants to be assured that Madeleine won’t blab about all this ‘despite whatever you may think’. He passes a cheque over to her. She smirks and, for a moment, I thought she was going to walk off without her payment but, to be fair, she stays in character and takes it. ‘I’d love to tell you what a monster you are, but I have to help bin Laden’s nephew buy a co-op on Park Avenue (remember the guy she was talking to earlier?).’ Case laughs. ‘If that were true, you wouldn’t tell me.’ ‘We’re listing you as a reference,’ she says and walks off looking insufferably pleased with herself. Case sighs and tries to throw his cheque-book onto the counter but it falls back off and onto the ground. Re: Madeleine’s payment. She didn’t recover the envelope, nor did she recover the diamonds or the ring. AND, because of that failure, Case may be blackmailed at some point (we may know it’s unlikely Dalton would bother but Case doesn’t) and will have to part with another large wad of cash to avoid being exposed. As Seinfeld would say, ‘Good work Nancy Drew!’ And yet she receives her payment in full and Case also has to help her out with her latest nefarious project.

Back to Dalton, spouting that bilge from the start of the film, ‘the who, the where, etc, etc’. His ‘cell’ looks pretty luxurious. He’s even using his mobile for Pete’s sake. It looks like a room that was already there, not a hastily constructed cubby-hole. While he hear him burbling, Dalton examines the diamonds and the ring, which he has in a nice little pouch. Then we watch the Steves putting up walls and suchlike earlier on, so it looks like they’ve just walled off part of the storeroom. Although in that case, what was the hole for and wouldn’t any of the bank employees notice the wall had been moved in. Maybe not, if it wasn’t moved in by much, considering that they may not spend huge amounts of time in the storeroom. Anyway, we can conjecture on that at our leisure because it’s time to go, so Dalton turns off the lights and emerges out into the room from behind some boxes. Good job no one’s around while all this goes on eh? He covers the hole back up. In a car outside, Steve points out that Dalton is ‘going to smell like s**t’. Steve-O: ‘What do you expect after a week?’ Chaim is there! I wasn’t counting on that. ‘Why do you think I rolled down the window?’ he says. Stevie laughs. Dalton’s really not in much of a rush, can he be that certain no one ever goes into the storeroom? He puts on sunglasses, a New York Yankees cap and a ruck-sack. Hold your horses though, Scarlett and Rhett have turned up outside! This causes consternation amongst the criminal contingent and they give Dalton a buzz. ‘That cop Frazier and his partner are walking into the bank.’ I know you’re all thinking it but I’m going to say it anyway. Coincidence or what? At the precise moment Dalton decides to stroll out with his ill-gotten gains, a whole week since the robbery took place, Morecambe and Wise decide to put in an appearance at the bank. ‘Are they coming for me?’ Dalton wonders. ‘Can’t say. It’s just the two of them.’ Dalton rather tentatively begins to walk out but gradually picks up speed. It seems to be easier than you might surmise to stroll around in the nether regions of banks undetected. As Keith comes up the stairs Dalton bangs into him as he goes the other way but the pair merely exchange apologies and move along. Keith greets ‘Mr Hammond’, who wishes him and Mitch a ‘good morning’. Dalton exits. ‘Just like he planned,’ says Stevie, admiringly.

Back inside, Keith remains eager to get his mitts on the missing safety deposit box ‘392’, and has got a court order allowing him to do just that. Back outside, Dalton walks over to the car, looking justifiably pleased with himself. He hands Chaim the bag, shakes hands with Steve and exchanges a long kiss with Stevie, while Steve-O ‘thank(s) God’ for his safe return. ‘Where is it?’ asks Chaim. ‘I left it in there.’ ‘Why did you do that? You left the ring.’ ‘Trust me. I left it in good hands.’

Time for a voiceover from Dalton: ‘I’m no martyr. I did it for the money. But it’s not worth much if you can’t face yourself in the mirror. Respect is the ultimate currency (the crooks drive off while Hammond shows Bonnie and Clyde where the safety deposit boxes are). I was stealing from a man who traded his away for a few dollars. And then he tried to wash away his guilt. Drown it in a lifetime of good deeds and a sea of respectability. It almost worked, too. But inevitably, the further you run from your sins, the more exhausted you are when they catch up to you (what a load of old bollocks, and I still want to know how Dalton is so knowledgeable about Chase’s misdeeds from over half a century ago. Anyway, while he’s been rabbiting melodramatically, the boys have opened the box to find … a ring, a few chewing gum wrappers and a note). And they do. Certain. It will not fail.’ Keith examines the ring and is suitably impressed. ‘What do you think that’s worth?’ The film is clearly drawing to a conclusion but there’s still time for Mitch to drop one last clanger, as he laughingly remarks, ‘If you got to ask, man, you can’t afford it’. That just doesn’t make any sense. If he’s got to ask he’s … not a diamond appraiser, although the initial fault probably lies with Keith for asking in the first place. ‘Thank goodness my girlfriend ain’t here,’ says Keith, apparently of the opinion that she would demand he steal the ring and propose on the spot. He turns to the note, which simply says ‘Follow the ring.’ Mitch looks, altogether now … bewildered!

Sonny and Cher head to the opulent offices of Mr Arthur Case. Everybody’s least favourite carpetbagger politely asks after Keith’s health. ‘I am great. Nobody got killed at the bank. Everybody’s happy. My kind of day.’ Case pours himself a drink. ‘I was most impressed by the way you handled that business … Whenever I hear the term ‘New York’s finest’ you’re who I think of (Saints preserve us!). You keep the rest of us safe and make it look easy.’ Keith laughs, as do the watching audience. ‘What’s so amusing?’ Case wonders. ‘When you say ‘the rest of us’ Mr Case, I mean, you got to look around. ‘The rest of us’ is a category that you haven’t qualified for in a long time.’ Keith definitely carries a bit of class envy around with him. Listen to the diamond thief old chap, money can’t buy you happiness. ‘Touché, Detective. I won’t deny it. I’ve done well.’ Despite his good humour, Keith remains ‘very confused’ . ‘I got a case where armed robbers laid siege to your bank (a siege is surely when you surround a building or town, so if anyone was laying siege to the bank it was the police, but hey, let‘s not be pedantic when Case is about to twist in the wind).’ Mitch wants to confirm that it is, in fact, Chase’s bank. He’s the ‘Chairman of the Board of Directors’. Keith: ‘Then ita-zita-vene-gazoo (I’m not quite sure what unusual magicians Keith was exposed to as a kid). The robbers disappear. Poof. And they don’t take a nickel, right?’ Chase is now on the run, so he tries to play down the bank’s significance. ‘It’s a tiny part of our organisation.’ However, Keith is dogged in pursuit, ‘No robbers. No real victims. No loot missing. It’s got to be the first time in law-enforcement history.’ He turns to that renowned criminology scholar Mitch to confirm that this is indeed the case. Mitch has ‘never heard of it before’. Time to resort to profanity: ‘You got to ask yourself, ‘what the f*** happened?’ don’t you Mr Case?’ Case doesn’t like Keith’s tone. ‘Then give me a straight answer. It’s the founding bank of your empire. You built it. It’s your baby. Give me a straight answer. What do you think happened?’ Case insists he is clueless but Keith doesn’t buy it and posits his own theory. ‘I think you sent that woman in there to patch things up. Miss White, I think you paid her. What was she doing in there?’ Bravo Keith, although you’d think he might have wondered this earlier. Case finds the theory ‘absurd’ but Keith shuts him up by barking ‘three ninety-two’ across the desk. ‘Safe deposit box three ninety-two. What’s the story on that?’ Case pleads innocence yet again, Keith flat-out calls him a liar. ‘I looked at all the records. At first glance, everything looked fine, but there was one safe deposit box that had no records. I mean, going all the way back to 1948. So I started thinking. Who would have the answer to this riddle? Probably the man who forgot to mention that he built the bank in the first place in 1948. It doesn’t add up, Mr Case.’ Case gets up and tries to bring proceedings to a halt. ‘It’s something really bad, isn’t it?’ Keith speculates. ‘Mr Frazier, I have spent my whole life serving humanity,’ says Case. ‘You can ask anyone who knows me (the camera pans across a selection of awards and paraphernalia on a shelf. Case is with Maggie Thatcher in one photo, which doesn’t massively enhance his humanitarian credentials). They’ll vouch for me, and for the things that I’ve done.’ Keith plays his final ace, ‘You think they’ll vouch for you after I find out the truth about this ring? (He has it on his finger.) I don’t think so. (Long pause.) Oh, by the way, that thing you said about us being New York’s finest? I want you to know, we really appreciate that.’ ‘How gracious.’ Keith puts his hat on aggressively. ‘Let’s go. We’re gonna follow that ring.’ I didn’t realise this was all based on a Tolkien novel. Mitch hangs around for a bit to glare at Case hilariously.

Outside, Mitch demands to see Keith’s shoe. This is going to be some ass-kissing thing about how he kicked Chase all round New York isn’t it? Yes, I’m afraid so. ‘Cause I have never seen anybody put their foot that far up a guy’s ass.’ Keith absolutely loves it. ‘Oh man. You cut him an ass the length of the Lincoln Tunnel. We’re gonna need a traffic cop on that s***.’ Keith has never heard anything so hilarious in his life. Bid Mitch a fond farewell, that’s the last we’ll see of him. Appropriate scene to go out on, with two pals apparently clowning around but one unquestionably in the senior role. Let’s not be churlish though, Mitch has been one of the joys of the film, if at times unintentionally.

Keith bowls into some restaurant ‘looking for the mayor’. ‘May I have your hat, please?’ asks an officious type. ‘No, you cannot. Get your own.’ Ha, ha! I’d imagine one of the best things about being a policeman is that you can be gratuitously rude to officious types without fear of repercussion. Madeleine and some nerd are dining with the Mayor and she is informing him that ‘they’re looking to invest $4 billion over the next four years’. Keith crashes the party. ‘Sorry to interrupt you Mr Mayor, but there’s an old American saying, ‘When there’s blood on the streets, somebody’s got to go to jail.’’ I know it pertains to Madeleine’s remark from earlier but that’s still a pretty bizarre opening salvo. Keith shows the company the ring. The mayor tells ‘Edwin’ the nerd to sod off, in so many words. Madeleine thinks Keith is ‘looking for closure’. He’ll go along with that. ‘This is the number of the War Crimes Issues office in Washington, D.C.’ He hands it to Madeleine, who apparently doesn’t have a phone-book of her own. ‘How’d you like to be on the front page of the New York Times?’ she enquires. ‘That’d be great. Make sure they spell my name right, though.’ ‘You made copies?’ Of what? The ring? Bit of a puzzler this scene. Is Case going to get done for having the ring or is it simply going to be restored to its rightful owners? Then again, the family it belonged to all died and they may not have any descendents. Keith, as his wont, laughs uproariously while everyone else remains stony-faced. ‘Please. We got to keep the real criminals off the streets, Your Honour. All right, well, thanks for lunch.’ He ambles away, leaving Madeleine to face the music. ‘War crimes, huh?’ says the Mayor. ‘What have you got me into this time?’ She looks somewhat chastened at last.

Keith returns to his apartment after a fun day putting the wind up people. Sylvia’s brother is sleeping on the settee. Keith goes into another room and whispers ‘Mama?’ Sylvia is lying on the bed. ‘Did you bring Big Willie?’ she asks. ‘And the twins.’ They kiss. Keith wants to ‘get his gun off’ before they get down to business. She poses sexily in his hat and he laughs happily. Ever since the end of the hostage crisis, Keith has been having the time of his life. We see the certificate he was given earlier: ‘Certificate awarded to Keith Frazier. In recognition of your dedication, superior achievement and outstanding service to the New York City Police Department and to the city of New York as witnessed by your designation as DETECTIVE FIRST GRADE (their caps)’. The certificate is dated August 12 2005 - my birthday! An auspicious date all round. Keith puts his gun, badge and phone away. What’s this in his pocket? It’s a sparkler! His mind leaps back to when he crashed into Dalton in the bank. That’s right, Keith. You crashed into your nemesis and let him stroll off into the sunset. We hear an earlier conversation. Keith: ‘Why don’t you just walk out the door?’ Dalton: ‘I will. I’m gonna walk out of that door when I’m good and ready.’ A look of dawning comprehension creeps across Keith’s face. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he murmurs. Then he laughs and admires the diamond. ‘Come on honey. The handcuffs are getting cold (what, have they been in the oven?)’ Sylvia says enticingly. Keith really is a jammy bastard.

Inside Man (part two)

Some of the hostages are sitting quietly together on the floor of a room. However, a youngish man has had enough of his painter’s apparel and rips off his mask. ‘They want to shoot me for taking off my mask, they can go ahead’. The other hostages don’t agree with this unilateral act of rebellion and a loud argument ensues. Dalton bustles in, to the traditional accompaniment of screeching from the female hostages, and drags this rogue element off by his legs .The young turk quickly ditches the bravado and promises to fall into line, meanwhile trying to grab onto things as he is pulled along. Dalton lifts him up and punches him in the face.

Interview room. Holmes and Watson are trying to crack the Rabbi. They make him produce his hearing aids when he claims he couldn’t hear much of what the robbers were saying, then they try calling him ‘Steve’ to see if he responds and finally they ask how much ‘they’ are going to pay the Rabbi. Despite these fiendish stratagems, no confession is forthcoming.

Bugged pizza delivery! The boys in blue have even thrown in a few bottles of pop to wash them down with. Some policemen dump the goods outside and Dalton emerges (‘If he gives us a tip, I’m keeping it’). Keith has tagged along and gets the men to shut up when, so cool a moment ago, they yet again start emitting panicked yells the moment someone comes out of the bank (‘Put that gun down! Check that weapon!’). Keith greets Dalton with a civil ‘How you doing?’ and introduces himself. ‘I hope the pizzas are okay, They might be a little cold.’ Why on earth might that be the case? Any Tom, Dick or Harry has been able to have a piping hot pizza delivered to their door for the last 20-odd years but these pizzas, which presumably would have been given ultra-high priority, have somehow managed to get ‘a little cold’? Why not just say ‘They might be a little cold … because we’ve spent the last half-hour faffing about putting digital recorders inside them,’ and be done with it? Or, better yet, don’t draw Dalton’s attention to the temperature of the pizzas at all? Keith continues: ‘Listen, you pick up the phone anytime you want. It’s a direct line to me, I would love to talk to you.’ Nothing if not anti-social, Dalton picks up the grub and sods off, leaving Keith to nosily peer through the locked bank door. Fortunately, Dalton’s so eager to tear into his pizza that he forgets he’s meant to toss a couple of bodies out if any police come near the door.

Back inside the van, the good guys are listening to the dodgy Hawaiians. A foreign voice is talking and Darius decides the crooks must be ‘f*****g Russians’ and starts to lose patience with Keith’s modus operandi. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. Because if my guys got to shoot it out with those f*****g savages …’ Keith, presumably accustomed to being questioned at every turn, expertly placates him.

Inside the bank, Stevie collects some hostages and leads them into another room. Outside she puts her own hood up, starts wailing and Steve or Steve-O throws her into the room with them as if she’s one of the captives, before leaving with another hostage, who he vulgarly refers to as ‘Boobs’. She takes umbrage but he’s not interested and tells her to move her ‘fat ass’. Again, she finds fault with his terminology but she receives short shrift and is moved into a room with a different batch of hostages. What peculiar goings on.

We’ve reached the picture board round of the post-match interview process. Some guy is looking at photos of the hostages and telling Crockett and Tubbs who he recognises. ‘She was on line in front me, he was the teller on my line, etc etc.’ He recognises one girl because of her ‘great tits’ and Keith laughs approvingly. Mitch asks this connoisseur of the female figure if he saw any of them after the ‘painters’ arrived. ‘Yeah, I saw her one time afterwards’. ‘How are you sure you saw her again’. ‘I could see under the suit. (You) Can’t hide quality like that’. I see. Everyone else is frightened for their life and wondering if they will get to see their loved ones again, meanwhile this clown is busily picturing women ‘under the suit’. It’s easy to mock but I wonder if I’d behave any differently. You do need to try and relax in times of stress.

Next in the chair is a woman who, it has to be reported, in order for you to understand the premise of this idiotic plot point, has ‘great tits’. It’s the loud phone-talker (Nancy) from the start of the film. She holds up a photo of a man and says, ‘This guy, he almost got us all killed,’ before going on to tell Scooby Doo and Shaggy about how the unfortunate lad tried to foment an uprising and got beaten up for his trouble. No, she didn’t see him again after that. No, she doesn’t recognise anyone else. She seems to have quickly surmised that her interlocutors are total dimwits and treats them with hostility: ‘You wanna take another picture? I could bend over and pick up a pencil. (Pause) Whatever. This guy (she holds up the photo again). Asshole.’

Inside the bank, Stevie does some manual labour next to the hole in the storage room. The shot allows us to appreciate that she too has ‘great tits’. Put them in painters’ masks and you could easily get her and Nancy mixed up! Yes, establishing this fact is the only point of the scene.

A Russian-speaking policeman arrives in the van, ready to tell Keith and company what the bank dwellers are chatting about. By the way, you can easily tell that the foreign voice, singular, which they’re listening to, is reading a speech of some sort, and sounds nothing like a group of people conversing as they eat pizza, but naturally these chumps haven’t noticed. The other problem is that the language isn’t Russian after all. Next time Keith, don’t go to Darius with your linguistic questions. The lingo is apparently neither Polish or Hungarian either and, to the chagrin of all concerned, the best the man can do is narrow it down to ‘Central European. Sort of’. The outlook is bleak but Keith has a idea …

… which is to play the tape over the van’s loud speakers and see if anyone out on the street recognises the language. Steve-O leans out of a window above, before turning around and yelling, ‘Boss, I think they might be bugging the pizzas!’ Okay, of course he doesn’t, but that doesn’t make the plan any less asinine. Keith only has to walk a few yards up the street to question the gaggle of bystanders, so the van can’t be that far from the bank. A man in a hard hat and builder’s gear duly recognises the language - it’s Albanian. He’s escorted towards the van muttering, ‘what am I doing here?’ to himself disbelievingly. If you don’t want to have any dealings with the police, don’t hang around crime scenes and then actively seek to help them, you buffoon. ‘Am I getting arrested for something?’ he asks. Yes pal, it’s illegal to admit you recognise the Albanian language.

Inside the van, the reluctant helper informs Keith that he recognises the dialect but cannot actually translate it. ‘I thought you said you spoke Albanian?/ I never said that’ back and forth. He doesn’t speak it himself but he is familiar with it because ‘my ex-wife and her parents are Albanian’. All above board. There didn’t look to be that many people out by the barricades but New York is so cosmopolitan that you can’t walk a block without running into someone who has an Albanian ex-wife. Keith turns to a policewoman. ‘Call the Albanian Consulate. See if they can get somebody over here to translate this for us. Make it happen fast.’ Good job he added the last sentence because she was originally planning to tell them to pop over in their own sweet time. Our Eastern Europe correspondent is told to ‘hang around in the back’ of the van. ‘Oh man, not again,’ is his latest nonsensical utterance. The other day he recognised some Albanian for a traffic cop in the Bronx and had to wait around for ages afterwards.

Mitch comes in but, as per, he’s got squat. ‘Van was stolen two days ago, but it’s clean. No prints.’ ‘Nothing?’ asks Keith. ‘Oh, apart from a bunch we found belonging to some dude called Dalton Russell,’ says Mitch. Just kidding, he confirms that when he said there were no prints, he did indeed mean there were no prints. Keith decides to check yet again that the exotic language is Albanian. ‘100% … undeniable,’ says a weary voice from the back of the van.

Back at the bank, the kid hostage is sitting on his own in the safe playing on his video game. Dalton brings him a slice of pizza and a bottle of drink. He takes a pew and inspects the game - it seems to involve a black guy driving around a ghetto-type arear shooting other black guys. ‘How does this game work?’ asks Dalton. ‘You get points for doing dirt, like jacking a car or selling crack. And you lose points if someone jacks your ride or shoots you.’ When he’s conquered this game, I don’t think the kid will be turning his attention to Pac-man and Space Invaders. We see the protagonist in the game get out of the car and shoot someone, which makes no sense because Dalton is holding the game while the kid munches away, and Dalton doesn’t know what the game involves, let alone how to play it. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaims, stunned by the violence. ‘What’s the point of this?’ Does he mean the game or this scene? The boy thinks the former. ‘Like my man 50 says, ‘Get rich or die tryin’. Yo, you’d get mad points for knocking over the bank.’ ‘You think that’s cool?’ says Dalton, delighted to meet a fan at long last. The poor bloke is greeted by screams of terror whenever he tries to engage with the other hostages, although, in fairness, said efforts to engage usually consist of dragging one of their number away for a beat-down. ‘Hell, yeah,’ says the kid. ‘You trying to get paid too.’ Dalton sort of laughs. ‘Finish your slice, I’ll take you back to your father.’ Why’s he been taken away from his father in the first place? (‘Hey kid, one of the Steves has called in sick. Watch the safe for a while wouldya?’) ‘I got to talk to him about this game.’ Dalton promises that ‘it’s gonna be okay’. ‘Cool’ says the tyke, who doesn’t seem in the slightest need of reassurance.

The policewoman brings bad tidings on the Albanian translation front. ‘I couldn’t tell what the guy (at the Albanian consulate) was talking about. I think he wanted money. I tried the State Department. That takes a month.’ Keith wants Bob the Builder to call his ex-wife but he demurs at first. ‘I hate that b***’. He doesn’t take much persuading though and I’m starting to warm to old Bob. He’s one of those martyr types who will do almost anything to help you out, but you then have to endure a lot of moaning from him while he gets on with it.

After a pointless scene of Dalton brooding in the bank, it’s time for ex-wife hi-jinks, because Ilina Miritia is in the house. She’s hot and I think Bob should reconsider his stance, although, knowing him, she played on his kindness to get a Green Card and then quickly got rid. Ilina presents Keith with a medium-sized bag. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Parking tickets. You can fix them?’ Parking tickets are made of, what’s that substance? Oh yeah, paper. It doesn’t take up much room. To fill a bag that size would surely require hundreds of tickets, unless they are now issued in phone-book format. Ridiculous. Keith will see what he can do. Ilina gets a cigarette out while she listens to the Albanian, Mitch tells her she can’t light up and she stares him down. ‘S***. Go ahead.’ Mitch is having an ineffectual day, I suspect not for the first time. She listens for a while, blows a bit of smoke in Keith’s face and then bursts out laughing. She knows who it is but wants a guarantee on the parking tickets before she spills. ‘They’re taken care of’. ‘It’s Enver Hoxha … He was the president of Albania.’ You’d think Keith might now finally grasp what the audience has known for about half an hour but the implications of this news escape him. ‘You’re telling me the former president of Albania is in there robbing a bank?’ ‘Enver Hoxha’s dead. That’s a tape of him discussing how Albanian people are great people. They are immortal people. I wouldn’t worry.’ You see Keith, when people, be they friends, relatives, bank robbers or hostages, sit around and eat pizza, it’s not that normal for one of their number to get up and launch into a long speech. After 30 seconds of listening to Hoxha’s peroration, any sentient human would have said: ‘It’s a tape, we’ve been rumbled’. The Keystone Kops we are presented with here need to call in the ex-wife of a builder who happens to be milling around outside to tell them the same thing. Worth it though, when Ilina is the woman in question. ‘I had to listen to all this nonsense in school. Communism is great. Capitalism is evil. Lenin, Marx, blah, blah, blah. It’s a tape.’ She departs, after Keith tells her to ‘watch where (she) parks next time’. Keith and Mitch ruminate on the vicissitudes of life. ‘They wanted us to bug them so they could send us on a wild goose chase. Last time I had my Johnson pulled that good, it cost me five bucks’. In his wildest goose dreams, Dalton couldn’t have imagined it would take his adversaries this long to spot the tape scam. ‘Five bucks?’ says an immediately interested Darius, who has been quiet while the Clown Court has been in session but fancies some of this action. ‘Yeah, Tijuana. Don’t ask.’ Keith looks for a drawing board to head back to, Mitch, for reasons unknown, goes through the bag of parking tickets, finds something disgusting in there and throws it away, and, in a bank office, Steve (or Steve-O), sits eating pizza while an I-Pod plays the speeches of Enver Hoxha.

Stevie and Dalton go into the room in the bank containing the safety deposit boxes. She picks the lock on one of them. Dalton, cigarette in hand, opens it and takes some documents out of an envelope addressed to Arthur Case.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get much worse for Keith … the Mayor arrives with Madeleine in tow. He clambers into their car to touch base. Introductions. ‘Miss White’ may be able to help Keith. ‘She has a certain amount of influence in these matters’. Keith is at a loss so Madeleine takes over. ‘What the Mayor means is that there are matters at stake here that are a little bit above your pay grade. No offence.’ ‘Well, why don’t you just tell the Mayor to raise my pay grade to the proper level and problem solved?’ Ha! Great answer. Keith does well to resist the urge to put Madeleine’s patronising head through a window and instead tries to opportunistically work a pay rise out of the situation. ‘From what I hear, that would have happened a long time ago if you’d been a little more diplomatic. But we can certainly discuss it.’ Madeleine’s omnipotence extends to police pay grades it seems. Keith says he was joking although, if she wants to fast track his rise to first grade, he’s ‘not gonna talk (her) out of it’. But there’s another snag, namely the ‘hundred and forty thousand dollars that seems to have walked away from the Madrugada cheque-cashing bust’. Keith says it’ll walk right back if he gets promoted to first grade. No he doesn’t, he says he had nothing to do with it.

Back in the van, Keith decides it’s high time he placed a call to Dalton, who deigns to pick up this time. ‘Well?’ ‘Is this the President of Albania?’ The very same. They chat and Keith intimates that Dalton will soon be going to jail but Dalton thinks otherwise. ‘This time next week, I’ll be sucking down pina coladas in a hot tub with six girls named Amber and Tiffany.’ ‘More like taking a shower with two guys named Jamal and Jesus,’ Keith retorts, surprisingly confident based on the day’s events so far. ‘And here’s the bad news, that thing you’re sucking on, it’s not a pina coladaaaaaa.’ Ha again! Keith’s really coming in to his own. Dalton laughs uproariously. ‘You really want to piss me off.’ Emboldened, Keith tries to set the agenda, ‘All right, here’s where we stand,’ but Dalton isn’t having it: ‘I don’t need your f*****g status report, Serpico. I tell you where things stand.’ Dalton wants what he asked for or he’ll off some hostages. Keith is very much on the case but ‘it’s not like the City of New York has 747s waiting around for days like this’. ‘If you don’t get my plane ready, then you might as well send a hearse.’ ‘Let’s focus on how we can both get what we want, all right’ suggests Keith, although I’m not convinced Dalton is too concerned about getting a win for all parties here. More threats from Dalton. Keith’s on it, ‘let’s just try to keep everybody calm, okay?’ ‘Don’t I sound calm to you?’ Keith allows that this is indeed the case. Dalton hangs up.

Madeleine is in the diner, Steve/Steve-O is digging in the storage room, we’re fast forwarding to an interview with ‘Mr Damerjian’. ‘Is that Albanian?’ asks Keith hopefully. Ha ha! The man’s stupidity never ceases to amaze. The crooks could have picked the speeches of any obscure politician in the world to bamboozle the cops with, but of course they chose one which would throw suspicion on to one of their number. ‘It’s Armenian.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ Good grief. ‘Detective, I was born in Queens. I’ve never been to Armenia, (or) Albania. I went surfing in Australia once.’ He wants some water because his throat is ‘parched’, but the ‘detectives’ find this hilarious. Reliable as clockwork, they make clumsy attempts to try and elicit a tearful confession but, as usual, they come to naught. Mr Damerjian (‘call me Kenneth’) was tied up in a room most of the time. ‘I saw you see me,’ he tells Keith. ‘I was locked up the in the room. You saw me gagged when you came in.’ God knows why Keith was touring the facility but let’s get on with it.

Back in the present, Keith’s on the phone with Dalton again, trying to negotiate more time to get the plane sorted out. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll send in some more food’. Bug the food again Keith, let’s find out what the Slovenian head of state has to say for himself! Dalton decides he will ask a question. The right answer buys them extra time, the wrong one spells bad news for a hostage or two. ‘Which weighs more? All the trains that pass through Grand Central Station in a year, or the trees cut down to print all US currency in circulation. Here’s a hint. It’s a trick question’. Dalton hangs up, Keith is bemused. Uh oh, Darius is going to weigh in. ‘It’s the trains. US money isn’t printed on paper at all. It’s cotton.’ Murmurs of agreement. He’s ‘one hundred per cent sure’ about this. ‘Okay,’ says Keith amiably and turns back to the phone, while everyone else puts their headphones on to listen in. What the ****? If they get this wrong, someone is going to be killed but hey, if Darius is ‘sure’, that’s good enough for them. Why don’t they a) get on the Internet or something and find out for certain about this, seeing as it might be an idea to cover all bases when innocent lives are at stake and b) do it in relatively sedate fashion, seeing as Dalton didn’t give them any deadline and they’re looking to play for time? ‘I got it,’ Keith tells Dalton, foolishly trying to take the credit for the answer. But here comes Mitch! ‘Wait a second. Wait a second.’ Keith tells Dalton he’ll call him back. ‘It’s a trap. They both weigh the same.’ Mitch has it all worked out. ‘They both weigh nothing.’ Keith wants to be absolutely sure on this, you simply can’t be too careful when people’s lives are at stake. ‘They both weigh the same or they both weigh nothing?’ ‘Tell him they both weigh the same. Do it now.’ For Pete’s sake, what’s the rush? Did Dalton say ‘have the answer in five minutes’? No. There is no hurry whatsoever, the cops can send someone to Mount Delphi to consult the f*****g oracle if they want to but they’re behaving as though the hostages are all going to get gunned down indiscriminately if they don’t solve this riddle within seconds. Keith turns back to the phone … without even bothering to get Mitch to explain his reasoning. The lives of these hostages are being treated with truly cavalier abandon. ‘They both weigh the same,’ Keith tells Dalton. ‘This time, send sandwiches,’ the quizmaster replies and hangs up abruptly once again. You’d think there’d be some measure of cheering, or at least a few exhalations of relief, and perhaps even, I daresay, a bit of praise for Mitch, but Keith simply says he thinks Dalton is ‘nuts’. Absent any plaudits, Mitch finally decides to give everyone a glimpse inside his computer-like brain. ‘He said ‘Grand Central Station’. Grand Central Terminal is the train station. Grand Central Station is the…’ But Keith can’t even allow Mitch this small piece of glory and butts in at the end with ‘post office’. I reckon Mitch secretly hates Keith, and that his servile manner is simply a way to get close to him before bringing him down. Darius, remarkably sanguine for a man whose imbecility almost cost someone their life, speaks up again. ‘Trains don’t pass through Grand Central. It’s the last stop for every train.’ This sparks some febrile debate about the subway system (Hilariously, Mitch asks Darius ‘How the f*** do you know?’ as if a working knowledge of such Byzantine matters as train routes is restricted to a few wise old elders) but a frustrated Keith calls for quiet. ‘Let’s just get the sandwiches.’ Keith, I’ll ask this a final time: what’s the F*****G RUSH! He makes to leave but the transport discussion quickly revs up again.

We here it continue even though we’re now inside the bank, suggesting the bugg-ers have somehow become the bug-ees. Elsewhere, the hostages are chatting nineteen to the dozen inside one of the rooms. To be more specific, some smartass (Chaim) is telling Seth, Brad and Gladys what’s what. ‘They’re robbers, not terrorists.’ ‘How do you know? They could be Al-Qaeda.’ Chaim has ‘studied these things’, he teaches ‘courses at Columbia Law on genocide, slave labour, war reparation claims’. Gladys wants to know if she can ‘sue anybody when this is over’. ‘Go nuts,’ says Chaim. In the storage room, Stevie, Steve and Steve-O examine the hole in the floor. ‘Now that’s a good looking s***hole’ says one of the men.

Night has fallen and Keith phones Sylvia. He tells her he’ll be home soon but then adds ‘It’s gonna be a long night, though, so don’t wait up for me’. She suggests coming down there, but he doesn‘t want the distraction. She saw him on TV, he looked ‘good, baby. Real good.’ He has arrived at the diner so he wraps things up and tells Madeleine to follow him. Implausibly, she, a random civilian, is going to have a quick word with the chief hostage-taker, having earlier been given the ‘ground rules’ by Keith. He calls the Riddler on his mobile and puts Madeleine on. She won’t tell Dalton her name. ‘What matters is what I can offer you.’ He wants specifics. ‘If I can be assured that certain interests are protected, I might be able to help you get what you came for.’ ‘I doubt that,’ says Dalton. Exactly. It’s truly bizarre the way Keith and Madeleine try to curry favour with Dalton by offering him quid pro quos. The outcomes people want here are not mutually compatible. Dalton wants to go scot-free with a load of loot in tow, Keith wants the polar opposite and, although Madeleine’s wishes are opaque, she has made contact through Keith, so they are unlikely to tally with Dalton’s objectives. He wants to know more about these ‘interests that (she) is trying to protect’. She parries this and asks what he is ‘hoping to get out of all this?’ ‘Rich, of course.’ She wants to chat person to person and confirms she neither works for the bank, nor is a cop. ‘Come on in’.

Keith and Madeleine head towards the bank with some cops. Keith says she’s ‘got ten minutes in there’. I know it’s not standard practice for mystery women to be ushered into a bank for tête-à-têtes with hostage takers but Keith seems to have accepted his place on the food chain. ‘I know this game is a mile over my head but I’m telling you, if you f*** me over…’ Madeleine assures him she ‘got where (she is) by collecting friends, not enemies’. She goes in.

Having been frisked, she potters over to the bank counter, where Dalton is lurking. ‘What makes you think I need help?’ ‘Well, the hundred people outside, for starters.’ Dalton’s not worried about them. Madeleine knows he knows that they’re not ‘fuelling (his) jet right now as we speak’ and lays out her offer. ‘If you give up now, I can ensure that you’ll serve the minimum. I’m thinking three years, four years at the most.’ ‘You can arrange that?’ ‘Well, you haven’t hurt anyone or stolen anything so yes, as a matter of fact, I can.’ Dalton wants more, and Madeleine has more to offer. ‘When you get out, you’ll have two million dollars.’ Dalton is intrigued. ‘Will I? How?’ It will be put ‘someplace safe’ to wait for him. Dalton, quite literally, says thanks but no thanks. Madeleine doesn’t see any alternatives for him but he nosily steers the conversation back to these mysterious ‘interests’ she keeps referencing. She remains schtum but Dalton knows it all anyway. ‘During World War II, there was an American working for a bank in Switzerland. (Cut to a shot of Case). Now, I don’t need to tell you that this period in history was rife with opportunity for people of low morals. People like this man. He used his position with the Nazis to enrich himself while all around him people were being stripped of everything they owned. Then he used his blood money to start a bank. Now, does this sound like it might be the man you work for or am I just whistling Dixie out of my ass?’ ‘I believe we understand each other,’ says Madeleine, still trying to maintain the façade that she holds the upper hand in this discussion. Dalton disabuses her of that notion, ‘what the hell can you do for me since I clearly know more than you do and I’ve planned this to perfection?’ Madeleine refuses to give up and clams that ‘if I need to, I can change your entire programme’. She lamely advises him to ‘stop being (her) problem’ and ‘start being (her) solution’ and demands two minutes in the safety deposit box room (no, not with Dalton). ‘I just need to go to one box.’ It transpires there’s no need, Dalton has the box on hand. ‘This could be very embarrassing to your employer.’ He shows her an envelope, helpfully daubed with a Swastika so we all know what‘s what. ‘He should have destroyed this a long time ago. He didn’t, so now it’s mine.’ Madeleine is happily lost for words for once so Dalton presses home his advantage. ‘Now, if the day ever comes where I have to stand before a judge and account for what I did here, you and your boss will do whatever it takes to help me.’ ‘You get out of here with that envelope and we’ll pay you a lot of money.’ Dalton will take that on board. ‘You’re not gonna tell me how you’re planning to get out of here are you?’ Madeleine asks. Au contraire. ‘I’m gonna walk right out the front door. Anything else?’ ‘How did you know about all this?’ I was wondering that myself. ‘Doesn’t matter. Fact is, all lies, all evil deeds, they stink. You can cover them up for a while, but they don’t go away.’ Well, from time to time they do go away, if the only evidence of them is in your possession and you destroy it. If you had documents about your person which proved that your fortune had been obtained by criminal means would you a) burn them before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’ b) put them through the paper shredder a billion times or c) put them in a safety deposit box at a bank, meaning there is a chance, however miniscule, that one day they will come to light. This is a cracking film but the entire plot does seem to be predicated on Chase answering c) to the above question. Anyway. Madeleine says ‘murder will out?’ Dalton says ‘precisely’ and turns to leave, although she still doesn’t get ‘what (he’s) doing here’. This pleases Dalton.

Madeleine gives Keith a heavily edited version of what occurred. ‘I told him that, since he hadn’t killed anyone, it wasn’t too late to surrender and get off with a lighter sentence’. She claims that was all folks but Keith laughs in her face. ‘You know, I don’t ordinarily get offended the first time somebody treats me like an idiot (good job) but you are pushing it.’ He wants the real scoop. ‘You don’t own me. This cheque-cashing thing, this coke bust, I can face that on my own … Talk to me.’ ‘Off the record?’ ‘Everything about you is off the record.’ She gave Dalton an ‘incentive’ and he’s supposedly ‘considering it’. Why did she have to go off the record to serve up that load of bull? Keith brings up how clever Dalton is. ‘One of your types, like the Ivy League type?’ ‘Clearly well educated.’ ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’ Keith now seems to have decided that, because Dalton and Madeleine may both have gone to Harvard, she’ll be able to predict his every move. ‘You talk like him, so think like him. What do you think he’s gonna do?’ ‘He’s not gonna kill anyone.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Because he’s not a murderer.’ ‘How do you know? … Most of the guys up in Sing Sing weren’t murderers until they killed somebody. You never know what a person will do until you push him into a corner.’ ‘But it doesn’t seem like you’ve pushed him into a corner.’ ‘It doesn’t does it? Seems more like he chose the corner.’ Keith thinks that she’s right and sends her on her way. ‘You got a card in case I need to call you?’ Madeleine spots a chance to make an arrogant exit. ‘I don’t think you can afford me.’ He doesn’t want your over-rated services woman, it may be something pertaining to the bank robbery. He tells her to ‘kiss (his) black ass’. ‘Careful, Detective Frazier. My bite’s much worse than my bark.’

Interview room. Abbot and Costello are talking to the young boy (Brian, eight and three-quarters) and his dad. Brian says he wasn’t scared in the bank. ‘I’m from Brooklyn .. Guns don’t scare me.’ Brian tells them about his encounter with Dalton. He looks at the photos but can’t pick Dalton out. ‘With the mask, they look all the same.’ Keith resignedly agrees.

A long-haired guy (Paul) with a criminal record is next for the treatment. Mitch reads out the salient details. ‘Attempted robbery. Liquor store. Well, this was a real step up for a small-timer like you, huh?’ Paul denies involvement and it turns out the liquor store charge was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘I was out with some friends and they held up a liquor store. What was I supposed to do?’ He accuses Mitch of being a ‘Wassa Wassa’. It’s a Spanish phrase for ‘a person that don’t come to your neighbourhood’. Keith pipes up: ‘How do you say ‘Rikers Island’ in Spanish?’ Droll Keith, but not helpful.

The Rabbi looks at the photos but doesn’t recognise anyone so Keith, eager not to end their chat empty-handed, decides to get some marital advice. ‘What do you think a guy like me should pay for a diamond ring?’ It all depends. ‘If you’d like, I could give you my nephew’s number … You’ll get a very good deal.’

Ren and Stimpy stare ‘aggressively’ at a woman, who I think is Stevie. They want to see what she’s wearing under her painter’s gear, the cads! She’s well endowed. Mitch: ‘You see, there’s just you and one other woman that fit the physical description of the female suspect.’ She’s curious for further details. ‘It’s your height, your age, and your, um…’ Mitch is finding it all a bit awkward but the good ship Keith sails in to harbour to help him out. ‘Your cup size.’ ‘So, I violated Section 34 double-D?’ she quips. The lads look back at her blankly.

Inside Man (part one)

‘My name is Dalton Russell,’ says Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), a thinking man’s type of bank robber, who is sitting in the darkness, staring moodily into the camera, as he delivers this introductory monologue. ‘Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself. I’ve told you my name. That’s the ‘who’. The ‘where’ could most readily be described as a prison cell (shot of poor old Dalton sitting reading in a cramped corner). But there’s a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being in prison (shots of Dalton lying on his front as he writes a letter or something and then doing a few press-ups - he must be really bored). The ‘what’ is easy. Recently I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery (I don’t think that sentence quite makes sense but we get the gist). That’s also the ‘when’. As for the ‘why’, beyond the obvious financial motivation, it’s exceedingly simple. Because I can. Which leaves us only with the ‘how’. And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.’ Intriguing, and not a little pretentious. The credits start.

Shots of New York, specifically the ‘Manhattan Trust Bank’ and also a van, presumably heading towards it. En route the van picks up a couple of characters in painting garb. This is a Spike Lee ‘joint’ by the way. That‘s promising. I like Spike Lee.

The ‘painters’, all nattily attired in masks and shades, park up outside the bank and prepare their ‘equipment’. Inside, it’s business as usual. A father speaks to his son as they wait in the queue, people talk business across desks, and a young woman chats in obnoxiously loud fashion on her hands-free mobile (‘Yeah, we’ll get lobster. I’ll put it on Mr Ansinori’s card’). A bank official discreetly tries to get her to shut up and she agrees to play ball but then complains to her phone buddy about the situation. ‘I didn’t know I was in a library. It’s a f*****g bank.’ A succinct argument, but specious, considering no one, anywhere, in any environment you care to name, wants to hear about her plans to milk the unfortunate Mr Ansinori for an crustacean-centric slap-up dinner. While this goes on, one of the painters strolls in, gets out a spotlight and begins pointing it around. I’m not convinced this is standard practice but he carries on unchecked. A shot of the bank’s security monitors shows us that the spotlight is disabling all the CCTV cameras but, again, whoever is meant to be monitoring the er, monitors, appears to be asleep at the wheel. Dalton, for I believe it is he, continues taking out the cameras at his leisure.

Some more painters come in and secure the door behind themselves. At long last, a rat is smelt and a security guard confronts the rascals. It proves a bad move because Dalton ghosts up behind him and sticks in a gun in his back for his trouble. ‘Everybody get down on the f*****g floor! Now!’ he bellows. Chaos reigns, as women scream and the miscreants, now wielding huge rifles, lob a few smoke bombs around and yell instructions. Dalton notices an elderly chap remaining upright and marches towards him. ‘You get the same treatment as everyone else, Rabbi,’ he explains even-handedly, then pushes the religious gent to the floor. ‘Now, my friends and I are making a very large withdrawal from this bank,’ Dalton informs the expectant throng, who had previously presumed they had stumbled into a controversial piece of performance art. ‘Anybody gets in our way, gets a bullet in the brain.’

Out on the street, Sergeant Collins (Victor Colicchio) is strolling past the bank, keeping his nose clean, when a passer-by remarks: ‘Hey officer, there’s smoke coming out of there,’ and keeps on walking, arm in arm with his lady. Not much point hanging around to see if you can be of any assistance is there? Smoke comes out of banks all the time. Collins attempts to investigate but the locked door keeps him at bay until Dalton eventually opens it a tad and sticks a gun in his face. There’s a warning to snoopers everywhere. ‘I have got hostages,’ he reports. ‘You f*****g cops come near this door, I start killing people. I’m not f*****g kidding man.’ His communication skills are rudimentary but you can’t deny he gets his message across. Dalton disappears, leaving Collins to radio in the details, while shooing potential bank customers away.

‘Baby, I’m fighting for my life over here.’ In the police station, streetwise, ultra-confident detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) is on the phone to his hot girlfriend Sylvia (Cassandra Freeman), also a cop. Keith explains, in unrealistic detail, (‘Do you know what kind of thin ice I’m on right now with this cheque-cashing thing? They want to lock me up.’ ‘But you didn’t take it.’ ‘Of course I didn’t take it baby. It’s just some lying drug dealer trying to save his own ass by f*****g me over.’) why they can’t get a ‘bigger place’ which somehow also pertains to her brother, ‘the only family (she’s) got’ getting nicked for stealing a car. It’s hardly the most acrimonious of disputes but peace is declared anyway and Keith promises ‘Big Willie and the twins for you when I get home.’ Very romantic. ‘I got the handcuffs,’ she purrs. ‘I got the gun,’ he croons. ‘I got a sudden urge to try and go out with a cop,’ I muse. Detective Bill ‘Mitch’ Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been listening in to the spicy chit-chat and doesn’t miss the opportunity to lampoon his partner’s sleazy conversational style with a brilliantly crafted one-liner: ‘Big Willie and the twins, huh?’ Or maybe not. Keith witters on about his girlfriend’s brother’s list of offences, how it’s awkward having the young brat sleeping in the next room and how ‘if we got married then things would be different’. No, I don’t see why he thinks that’s the case either. There’s no rule that says just because you’re married, you don’t have to provide shelter for a young brat, and a bigger place with a young brat residing in it, is still a place with a young brat residing in it. Anyway, he doesn’t fancy marriage, for various clichéd reasons, including the expense of the ring, even though the fact he’s been married before ‘crops’ up. ‘You give her a ring?’ ‘Yeah, but she won’t call me back.’ The witty repartee is brought to a halt by the arrival of Captain Coughlin (Peter Gerety) who brings news of the bank situ: ‘Christmas came early for you this year.’ With ‘Grossman’ on vacation, it’s up to the comedy kings to save the day - the ‘cheque-cashing thing’ notwithstanding (‘I just threw you a bone’). The boys head off, practically high-fiving each other at the news that dozens of innocent people are being menaced by gunmen. ‘This is it, baby. The show!’ Mitch enthuses. More banter as Keith puts on his hat. ‘Look out bad guys, here I come,’ he remarks. He’s not really much of a team player.

The hare is on the move! Police vehicles pull up outside the bank in their droves and their passengers swarm out, armed to the teeth. The area is taped off to exclude the public, who nosily cluster on the other side of some barriers, and a TV news crew arrives.

Elsewhere, a lackey called Katherine enters a huge office to inform ‘Mr (Arthur) Case’ (Christopher Plummer) that ‘there’s a robbery in progress at one of our branches’. He’s appropriately concerned and, after checking nobody has been hurt, asks which of their branches it is. ‘20 Exchange Place.’ He asks again, the deaf old coot. ‘20 Exchange Place’. He thanks her, slowly sits down and murmurs ‘Oh dear God’ to himself.

Batman and Robin arrive at the bank and exit their car purposefully. Collins is on hand and, having ascertained that Keith is the ‘hostage negotiator’ (‘Come on out crooks, I’ve got Big Willie and the twins waiting for you!’), he brings him up to speed. Keith tells Collins he did well and decides there’s time for some small talk. ‘You ever had a gun stuck in your face before?’ Collins has, ‘by a 12-year-old’. Keith commiserates and departs, after Collins says he’ll stick around ‘at least until we make contact’. What good is he going to be? These dilatory cops will do anything to put off doing the paperwork.

Bank interior. The hostages are herded into an area next to a huge safe. Dalton struts around aggressively, and a female co-conspirator (‘Stevie’ - Kim Director) orders the bank employees to one side, while the unfortunate customers stay where they are. Dalton wants everyone’s mobile phones and keys. His minions scurry around with sacks, which the hostages drop the goods into, but some chap hasn’t got a phone. Dalton ambles over and asks his name, which is Peter Hammond (Peter Frechette). He’s left his phone at home but Dalton can’t hide his scepticism. ‘Peter, think very carefully about how you answer the next question because if you get it wrong, your headstone will read: here lies Peter Hammond, hero, who valiantly attempted to prevent a brilliant bank robbery by trying to hide his cellular phone, but wound up getting shot in the f*****g head.’ Peter is sweating hard, but assures Dalton that his phone has indeed been left at home. Dalton starts going through the phones in the sack, fiddling around with them and then chucking them onto the floor, until he finds one which has P.Hammond on speed dial (as well as Mom, Bucky (?), Eric, Ian, Voice and Home. P.Hammond is top of the tree - I suspect an office romance is afoot). Dalton dials the number and a rap song ring tone starts to play in an office right next to where they are standing. Dalton marches in, Hammond looks justifiably terrified. Bit of bad luck that his office was right next to the ‘Trade in your mobile phone for nothing’ HQ eh what? ‘Okay, I f****d up. I’m sorry. Please,’ he begs. ‘Hey. Don’t worry about it,’ says Dalton magnanimously, handing him back his phone. However, he heads back into the office and shuts the door, and through the glass we can see him gesticulating humorously as he debates with himself how best to punish this nitwit. He settles for dragging him into the office, smacking him in the face a few times and then kicking him, which we also watch through the glass. Dalton doesn’t seem to be a massive fan of rap song ring tones. He comes back out, to be greeted by unhappy squealing. ‘Anyone else here smarter than me?’ he wonders. Most of the hostages sensibly treat it as a rhetorical question, although one woman tearfully says ‘no’, evidently being of the mind that beneath Dalton’s gruff exterior lurks a keen intellect.

For his next trick, Dalton bowls over to a guy called Vikram Walia (Waris Ahluwalia) who is holding up some keys. He takes the keys and the young lad we saw having a chin wag with his dad earlier also offers him some sort of Gameboy. Dalton lets him keep it, he has more pressing matters to deal with. ‘I need all of you to strip down to your underwear’. I like a man who will go to almost any lengths to get a few cheap thrills and also approve of the word usage. He wouldn’t like you to strip off, he doesn’t want you to strip off - he needs you to strip off. This is a twisted individual indeed. The hostages do as they are instructed, then Dalton walks down the line, pulls out three women, turns to his pals and says ‘These will do team, let’s get out of here’. No he doesn’t, he heads over to a woman at the end of the line, who has defiantly remained fully clothed. ‘Believe me. This is the only situation where I’d ask you to do this,’ he tells her. No need to be so rude about it! She’s not on board with the plan and replies that ‘(he) should be ashamed of (him)self’. Quite right. As usual, rather than debate the matter in a reasoned, adult fashion, Dalton points his gun at her face. She still refuses to disrobe. ‘What’s with you mishegoyim? Go ahead. Make my day.’ Stevie drags her away, the rest of the hostages are all given painting suits and masks to put on.

Danger mouse and Penfold enter the ‘command post’ van, from which the police are basing their operations. Captain John Darius (Willem Dafoe) is inside. Introductions dispensed with, Keith heads down memory lane. ‘You may remember, we worked that hospital thing on 93rd, during my training?’ Darius does remember. ‘Oh yeah. That was a real shame,’ he responds. Doesn’t sound like Keith’s training went altogether smoothly, though he doesn’t seem too haunted by the recollection. He asks what’s happening in the bank but Darius hasn’t got the foggiest because none of the cameras are working and, in any case, ‘the way this works, Mr Frazier, is I deal with Mr Grossman’. Keith will not be fobbed off and informs Darius that, due to Grossman’s poorly-timed holiday, ‘Detective Frazier is the big dick today, all right?’ Mitch looks on admiringly, he loves it when Keith lays the smack down to these cheeky upstarts. Darius accepts the situation and calls out for ‘Berk’ to ‘get these guys some vests’. They’re on the team! Keith lays the schedule out for Darius. Him and Mitch are ‘gonna take a walk down to the diner’ while Darius prepares ‘a detailed briefing’. That doesn’t sound like an entirely equitable distribution of the workload but a chastened Darius puts it through on the nod. ‘Good to see you, Captain,’ Keith smirks before exiting.

Outside the van, Mitch has the temerity to question Keith’s strategy. ‘Shouldn’t we be in there (the van, not the bank)’ he enquires. Keith thinks not (‘Your call, Keith’ says Mitch, quickly falling into line) and waffles on for a bit about how the proper cops think hostage negotiator types are a bunch of jokers because ‘us being here means there’s a mental side to it that they don’t get’. How such a bunch of thickoes manage to solve a single crime is a daily mystery to Keith. But wait, he’s not as self-assured as he seems. ‘I keep waiting for someone higher up on the food chain to show up and say ‘Here’s what we do’’. Mitch asks about the ‘hospital thing’. ‘Guy shot himself, (and) shot his girlfriend.’ These pesky trainee negotiators are the bane of the criminal classes everywhere! The boys head into the diner for a well-earned bite to eat, unused to all this hard work. I mean, there can’t be that many hostage situations surely, and Grossman clearly handles the bulk of them. What on earth do Poirot and Hastings do with all their time?

Inside the bank there’s a bald man sitting on a chair struggling to breathe (Herman Gluck - Gerry Vichi). ‘I’ve told you I’ve got a heart condition,’ he manages to wheeze. He is pushed onto the street by the robbers but the fact he is in a hooded all-over body suit and a mask bewilders the police, who point their guns at him and start shouting. They get the mask off and he blurts out a few nuggets of information (‘If you come near the bank he’ll throw out two dead bodies’) then asks if he’s going to be on the box. Of course you are my friend, every channel out there knows that some old fool babbling incoherently is must-see TV.

A middle-aged man sits in an interrogation room and burbles on about how he ‘thought about … not seeing my wife again’ or his kids for that matter. The lighting is different and the tenor of his chat indicates that this is some time in the future, that he got out of the bank alive, and that the Hardy Boys, who are looking on impassively, still haven’t got a clue what the hell went on.
Back to the bank. The hostages are all sitting together in various rooms, wearing their suits and masks, while the robbers perambulate around the place until they encounter a large store room. ‘Beautiful,’ murmurs Dalton, as he stares at some boxes.

We arrive at the impressive offices of sexy, smug, quasi-enigmatic Mrs Fixit Madeleine White (Jodie Foster) as she deals with a client whose ‘only intention is to spend time in your wonderful city’. He certainly won’t be having dealings with his uncle, who he hasn’t seen in nine years, according to a source of Madeleine’s. ‘You are extremely well informed,’ observes the uncle-avoider. ‘I have to be,’ Madeleine explains. Her PA comes in and announces: ‘I have a Mr Arthur Case on the phone for you,’ saying the name in a pained, over-pronounced fashion, as if he’s got Elvis Presley on the blower instead of some boring old bank bigwig. Nonetheless, she winds up her meeting quick-smart and heads to her desk, upon which is a computer, upon the screen of which appears … her PA. What a nightmare job for the lad - purely on a whim his boss can click her mouse and see what he’s getting up to, although it doesn’t look like she can see what’s on his own terminal, so presumably he can read ‘Films in full’ and she’ll think he’s busy studying statistical surveys regarding how regularly people see their uncles. They have some back and forth about whether it’s Case himself on the line or his secretary. It’s him, eventually he’s put through and Madeleine dismissively puts her computer onto screensaver mode. But the PA is left trapped in existential limbo, wondering if she’s still spying on him, while she talks to Case, of if he dare crack open his sandwiches.

Madeleine and Case talk. He wonders if they have ‘met formally’ but she doesn’t ‘believe we have’. ‘Yet you’re always turning up at my July 4th parties in Southampton,’ he points out. ‘Yes, we, er, know some of the same people,’ says Madeleine. All well and good, but if these no-doubt raucous jamborees really are hosted by Case, surely, as a guest, you at least say ‘thanks very much for having me’ at some point. The manners of the upper classes are quite reprehensible. Case is unworried about such niceties and gets to the point. ‘I have a small problem which requires someone with very special skills and complete discretion’. She’s interested and agrees to meet him outside in five.

Back to the more grimy lighting, as another, rather battered-looking, former hostage, tells the Fabulous Baker Boys what occurred in the bank. ‘They had a kind of genius plan for throwing us out of whack and depriving us of any way of controlling ourselves.’ A different ex-hostage elucidates on this: ‘All I know is that they called each other a variation of Steve. Steven, Steve-O.’ For some reason, Keith thinks this is a load of bull and demands the truth but this guy, a dark-haired man, aged 30ish, simply continues with his yarn. ‘They had AK-47s out. Four of them.’ A grinning Keith jumps all over this. ‘You know a lot about guns,’ he says, leaving out the ‘Ergo, you’re obviously a criminal mastermind. Hurry up and spill the beans, me and Mitch need to get down to the diner’ which is clearly on his mind. But the ace up his sleeve is trumped once again. ‘Everybody knows what an AK-47 is,’ says the exasperated suspect. ‘Everybody?’ asks Mitch in disbelief. ‘Anybody who’s ever watched a decent action movie would.’ And so would people who’d watched ‘Inside Man’. Ha ha!

Holmes and Watson are getting really desperate now. They’ve resorted to grilling our friend Herman Gluck. Keith decides to subtly circle his prey, hoping to relax him and trick him into a mistake by cleverly probing him about apparently unrelated matters … - ‘You ever rob a bank before?’ .. - but then remembers the diner shuts within the hour and opts for a more full-on approach. Baldy laughs this off and denies ever stealing so much as a dollar, although after Keith points at him and says ‘That one time’ about three times, he breaks down and confesses all. ‘I stole a nickel from my grandmother’s pocketbook once. She was Polish’ Good work lads! Keith radios upstairs: ‘Well boss, we’re still all at sea on the old bank robbery but you can consider the case of the missing Polish nickel firmly closed.’

Darius wants to speak with Keith. He knows where to find him! ‘Look, Detective, I didn’t mean to give you a hard time back there,’ is his opening salvo. Keith tells him not to worry. Darius relays Herman’s news, namely that, as far as Dalton and co are concerned, cops near the bank door = two dead bodies. Darius and his team have everything under control, including the phones, which have been ‘cut and diverted into M.C.C. We’re the only ones they’re gonna call.’ There’s a pause. All the bases are covered, so it seems Keith is expected to phone the robbers. The only problem is, he can’t be bothered. Darius is surprised but, to Keith, it ‘doesn’t feel right yet … I’m not gonna call him and ask what I can do for him. Let’s see what he does. Come on Mitch, back to the diner!’ Okay, he doesn’t say that last bit. ‘Your call,’ says Darius and they head into the van.

Madeleine and Case take a stroll by the river. Case has apparently told Madeleine that ‘there are family heirlooms inside (his) safety deposit box’. She rambles on about how the fact Case’s own ‘people’ aren’t handling it tells her ‘that there’s something in that box that you don’t even want your closest aides to know about’. For some reason she feels the need to point out that, if the box contains ‘the launch codes for a nuclear missile, then let’s just say we no longer have an agreement’. Case is as tired of her prattling as the rest of the us and asks if she’s finished. He assures her the contents of the box pose ‘no danger whatsoever to anyone’. Nonetheless, Madeleine can’t guarantee results because ‘there are men with guns in there’. More to and fro about this mysterious box. Case doesn’t want anybody knowing what’s inside it. ‘The contents of that box are of great value to me. So long as they remain my secret.’ If they’re exposed he’ll ‘face some difficult questions,’ so Madeleine gathers that the box is to stay ‘locked, or it disappears’. She is confident she can get the job done but Case, who is something of a sourpuss, ‘can’t help but be sceptical’. ‘Whoever gave you my number got the same deal,’ Madeleine replies. ‘Clearly, they must have been satisfied.’ She puts her sunglasses on in characteristically self-satisfied fashion. I think a ‘now look Case, I’m on the Case’ retort would have been more endearing.

Inside the bank of fun, a male robber (Steve - Carlos Andres Gomez) is moving things around in the aforementioned store room. Dalton comes in. ‘Steve?’ ‘It’s time for Steve-O’. Dalton leaves, Steve starts smacking holes in the floor.

Outside, Mitch is immensely pleased with himself because, having learnt the crooks came in disguised as painters, he has found a painter’s van! He eagerly shows Keith the fruits of his labour but his rewards are scant. Keith easily pulls off the sign on the van (‘Perfectly planned painting - we never leave until the job is done!’), and tells Mitch to have it checked for prints. He strolls off, Mitch scampering in his slipstream.

Tired of Mitch’s pathetic efforts to please, Keith decides it’s time to give the robbers a call. No luck though, Dalton sits there letting the phone ring. ‘Okay. Nothing yet,’ Keith tells the van, somewhat superfluously, considering they were all listening in on the call. Some video footage has arrived though, which Mobile Command Officer Rourke (Daryl Mitchell) plays back for the group. They watch Dalton offing the camera with his spotlight. Clueless as ever, Keith can’t work out why none of the customers are noticing this horseplay, ‘you’d think it (the spotlight)’d be pretty bright’. Rourke explains all: ‘Infrared bulb. Humans can’t see it, but a video camera will pick it up.’

Back to the interviews. Next to face Keith and Mitch’s ‘bad cop, even worse cop’ routine is Miriam, the woman who wouldn’t get her kit off, despite Dalton’s charming entreaties. She’s pretty upset and even Laurel and Hardy don’t seem to consider her a viable suspect. They cheer her up by pretending otherwise (‘Could you give us the names of the bank robbers, maybe?’ ‘Did you rob the bank?’) and everyone has a good laugh. Nice guys, great comedy duo, lousy thief-takers.

A hostage is thrust out of the bank with what looks like a suitcase around his neck. Once again, the cops surround him and start barking at him. ‘Put your hands on your head and get down on your f*****g knees’. They finally notice that his hands are tied behind his back and that he can’t speak very easily because he has a mask over his mouth. They pull it down and the hostage turns out to be Vikram. The cops wonder if the suitcase is a bomb. ‘Oh s***! A f*****g Arab!’ These cops aren’t exactly ice-cool under pressure. ‘What? No, I’m a Sikh,’ says Vikram, who assures them that he is not walking around with a bomb around his neck. He is wrestled to the ground for his trouble while two policemen bring the suitcase over to Keith and company, who look on as Vikram is led away, angrily complaining because the cops have wrenched his turban off.

In the middle of a busy open-plan office, some old cove is getting his schedule sorted out. ‘Your honour,’ says Madeleine, who has come striding in. The old cove in question is the mayor. He greets her effusively and she thanks him for seeing her at short notice. ‘I always have time to put on a tux and eat free food for a good cause,’ he says, and she requests his presence at a fundraiser for spinal cord research. However, it seems such convivial chat may have been for the benefit of passers-by because, once they are alone, the gloves come off. ‘What the f*** do you want?’ ‘A favour.’ ‘Which kind.’ ‘The last one I’ll ever ask of you.’ ‘That’s the kind I had in mind.’ Madeleine wants the mayor to take her down to the bank and get ‘whoever’s in charge to extend (her) every courtesy’. The mayor is unsure about the soundness of such a scheme and informs Madeleine she is ‘out of (her) f*****g mind’ and that it would be ‘impossible’ to accede to her request. She laughs this off and tells him to ‘call in a few markers’. ‘I may have to give out a few,’ he responds. ‘Then that’s exactly what’ll you do,’ rasps Madeleine, clearly confident of ultimate victory. The mayor gazes at her respectfully. ‘You’re a magnificent c***,’ he ludicrously remarks. ‘Thank you,’ says Madeleine and turns tail. You see, when you reach the upper climes of society, words formerly considered extremely offensive suddenly become gracious compliments. Try it next time you run into a member of the aristocracy.

A news reporter appraises her viewers of the situation, telling us nothing we don’t already know, as we watch the painters’ van get towed away. There’s plenty of work to be done but the dynamic duo are ensconced in the diner once again, and they’ve even deigned to bring Darius along. They’re trying to interview Vikram but he’s ‘not talking to anybody without a turban’. I think he wants his own turban back, rather than for the interview to be conducted by a turbaned individual. He’s ‘not an Arab, by the way, like your cops called me outside’. Darius sniffs damaging controversy and shrewdly tries to tamper it down by … speaking to Vikram as if he’s five years old: ‘I don’t think you heard that …you were probably disoriented.’ Vikram ‘heard what (he) heard’ and again calls for his turban. Mitch points out the gravity of the situation and suggests Vikram chat to them and worry about his turban later. ‘First you beat me, and now you want my help.’ ‘You need to start thinking about your co-workers (Vik worked at the bank, forgot to mention that earlier).’ And don’t forget Vikram, those Neanderthal cops are nothing to do with our heroes. ‘I could apologise on behalf of the NYPD but that was not us. We are detectives.’ Just like The Thompson Twins! Vikram condescends to answer a couple of questions, while holding some ice to his forehead, but détente does not last long. ‘I’m f*****g tired of this s***. What happened to my f****** civil rights?’ He moans about how he’s also harassed at airports, where he ‘can’t go through security without a ‘random’ selection’. Keith hunts for the bright side: ‘I bet you can get a cab, though,’ and Vikram concedes that is ‘one of the perks’.

Keith reads out the message from the robbers, which was scrawled on the object Vikram carried out. You’d think he might have glanced over this missive before going for a doughnut with Vik, but better late than never. ‘(They want) Two buses with full gas tanks. One jumbo jet with full gas tank and pilots at JFK, parked at the end of the runway.’ Keith adds, ‘they give us until nine pm to do this, then they kill one hostage every hour in front of TV cameras,’ then reads aloud again: ‘Bank is secured with Semtex, we will demonstrate if necessary.’ But Dalton’s refusal to so much as give Keith the time of day has really rubbed him up the wrong way. ‘Till I talk to them, they get nothing. For now, we wait’. But before the three amigos can scarper back to the diner, Arthur Case arrives to say howdy-do. Good old Art was wondering if he ‘might be of some assistance’. When he asks what the malefactors have demanded, Darius tells him ‘they want a jet’. ‘Oh, I see (long pause), would you like me to arrange one for you? (very long pause, as Keith, Mitch and Darius look disbelievingly at Case, who realises that’s probably not a great idea) I’m so sorry. I must have misunderstood.’ Case wants to hang around (‘those are my people in there’) but Collins arrives to turf him out. Case graciously thanks him and leaves, as Collins gives the gang an uncalled for ‘who is this geriatric buffon’ look behind his back.

A hostage pops out of the bank with a note, which Darius accepts from a cop. The note reads ‘Fifty plus hungry people need food now’ but, standing alone, he reads it aloud as ‘Fifty hungry people need food now’. Poor old Darius isn’t the brightest spark is he, having to enunciate the words when he’s reading and even then getting it wrong? Either that, or the film makers wanted us to know what was on the note without us having to bother reading it ourselves and imparted the information in spectacularly maladroit fashion. Why not have Darius glance at it, then take it to Keith, who could read it aloud for Mitch’s benefit? Anyway, there’s 30 seconds of your life you wish you could have back. Keith looks pleased by the note because …

… he’s going to bug the food! The police woman detailed to carry out this wheeze informs him ‘pizza’s the best. No sandwiches’. Mitch doesn’t see why it matters but, instead of seeking clarification from the source, he asks Keith if ‘she (is) for real’. What obnoxious behaviour. Keith asks her if she is ‘for real’. You’d think bugging the hostage-takers might have come up during his training at some point, but I expect he was getting something to eat while that lecture was on. The lady patiently explains: ‘If we send in, say, ten pizza boxes with transmitters, maybe we’ll get some conversation if we give them something to group around. Give them each a sandwich, it’s hit or miss. They can move around and I don’t have 50 transmitters.’ If I was in Dalton’s shoes, I’d specify exactly what sort of food was delivered. If it all goes wrong it could be your last opportunity to decide for yourself what you eat, so why leave it up to these jokers? Keith is holding a thin, pen-like object. ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s a digital recorder.’ How on earth should he know? ‘James Bond s***,’ he says, impressed. In ‘Life on Mars’ the policeman goes back in time from the present day and can’t believe how backward everything is, but I think the big plot twist coming here is that Keith’s going to turn out to be a cop somehow transported forwards from the 1950s. That’s the only explanation for his sense of wonder at what is surely bog-standard police equipment. Mitch asks Keith if he will request the release of a hostage. Pizzas for hostages scandal? Keith points out that they already got one and then pays homage to ‘Mr Wendal’ by Arrested Development: ‘He gave us a hostage, we’ll give him some food.’