The Inside Man
Stars: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe,
Christopher Plummer
Director: Spike Lee
Critic's rating: 7 out of 10
Review by Chuck O'Leary
Spike Lee's The Inside Man puts a fresh spin on
the heist/hostage thriller, while retaining enough of the cynical New York City
attitude that made Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The
Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) so memorable.
Although it never quite reaches the level of those '70s
classics, it exhibits a lot more personality and wit than most commercial
movies coming out of Hollywood these days, and for that alone we
should be thankful.
In its smart, knowing dialogue, The Inside Man
is a welcome throwback to the urban crime films of '70s, a time
before the plastic Mall Movie mentality took over, and even the most mainstream
of movies were populated with the kind of grizzled characters who've seen it
all and who've seen too much.
Like fellow filmmakers raised in and still living in NYC,
Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet, Lee knows the Big-Apple melting pot and
its denizens inside out from years of personal experience. While the
NYC films of other directors, like, for instance, Richard Donner's current
16 Blocks, are filmed in Canada and seem
manufactured in their grittiness, Lee's latest, which was actually
filmed in NYC, feels a lot closer to capturing the real spirit of
America's biggest metropolis.
Like Dog Day Afternoon and The Taking of
Pelham One Two Three, The Inside Man concerns an
attempted robbery in NYC, the subsequent hostage situation that develops,
and the varying reactions of a cross-section of New Yorkers.
When four or five masked armed robbers led by mystery man
Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) seize a Wall Street bank, take about 40 or 50
hostages and demand a plane out of the country, it seems like Dog Day
Afternoon all over again with a decidedly more cunning brand of
criminal. A veteran detective named Keith Frazier (Denzel
Washington, in his fourth Lee film to date), who himself is under
investigation within his own department for theft, is called in with his
partner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to lead the negotiations.
But when a shadowy, icy professional "fixer" named
Miss White (Jodie Foster) gets hired by bank founder and CEO Arthur
Case (Christopher Plummer) to intercede, it becomes increasingly clear to
Frazier that this is no ordinary robbery with no ordinary motive.
Three quarters of the film unfold as a series of intense
confrontations during the actual robbery interspersed
with flash-forwards to Frazier's often-colorful interrogations of
surviving hostages, which account for some great offhand moments.
Unlike so many other movies, where filmmakers merely and blandly just seem to
be marking time between action sequences, The Inside Man is
most alive during the fractious little moments where characters
are simply interacting.
Lee's direction is unusually observant of human behavior for a
film that's ostensibly a thriller with a clever twist, and even the supporting
players who have only a handful of lines are distinctly drawn and very well
cast. It's Lee's interest in the small moments that makes The
Inside Man above average, and his best film since Summer
of Sam (1999). But it's not without shortcomings. One
character is too obviously a villain from the moment they appear on screen due
to the reversed stereotypes of modern-day Hollywood, the story's outcome
is eventually too contrived to be believed, and things take too much
time to wrap up in the last quarter.
Those flaws notwithstanding, The Inside Man is as
well acted as expected by this superior group of actors, and
is directed with a lot more nuance by Lee than most major-studio
films of today. And even though its plot is highly unlikely once the
pieces of the puzzle come together, it is refreshingly
realistic in the sense that its characters often act with
the kind of self-preserving self-interest people often do in real life --
something most contemporary movies avoid in favor of clichéd, feel-good
epiphanies.
