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Film review

A classic heist film

A sharp script and a strong cast imbue Spike Lee's latest film, Inside Man, with compelling drama.

By PHILIP BOOTH
Published March 23, 2006

	[Universal Pictures]
	Acting powerhouses Jodie Foster and Denzel Washington star in Spike Lee’s Inside Man.

Spike Lee's brand of front-and-center message-giving has been remarkably effective, provocative and even profound in movies such as Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever and Malcolm X. Elsewhere, in the more recent She Hate Me and Bamboozled, the Brooklyn-born filmmaker has simply been sloppy, unfocused and clearly off his game.

Inside Man, a heist film with a top-flight cast, is cut from a different cloth than the usual "Spike Lee Joint," as he calls his productions. It's a genre movie, a crime thriller that's as carefully orchestrated and as smoothly executed as its predecessors, including Dog Day Afternoon. That 1975 movie is directly referenced with a line of dialogue in rookie screenwriter Russell Gewirtz's crackling script, an impressive debut. It's a big, commercial movie that nevertheless features telling Lee touches.

The plot essentials are familiar. A menacing criminal mastermind, played by a gritty, snarling, perfectly cast Clive Owen, leads a quartet of criminals - all dressed like house painters - in a daring robbery of a Manhattan bank in broad daylight. Hostages are taken, a police command station headed by a coolly decisive captain (Willem Dafoe) is set up outside, a crowd gathers, media types swarm and fast-talking hostage negotiator Keith Frazier (Lee regular Denzel Washington) is called to duty.

It's a tense cat-and-mouse game with a few twists, not all of which hold up to close scrutiny. Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), the wealthy old man who founded the bank, is obsessed with making sure that the thieves don't access a particular safety deposit box. It contains a document that apparently would cause untold damage to his reputation. (This thread is the biggest crack in Gewirtz's screenplay: Why wouldn't the paper simply have been destroyed decades earlier?) Case enlists a squirrelly, well-connected mover and shaker (Jodie Foster) in his cause, and she manages to gain access to the robbers.

Lee's film is energized with several handheld camera sequences and a reprise of his old effect enabling a man to move across the screen with no apparent means of locomotion.

It's also peppered with grainy flash-forwards to tautly edited post-crisis interviews with the hostages, which tend to undercut the suspense; too much is revealed too early about the upshot of the siege.

And it wouldn't be a Spike Lee movie if he didn't make a trenchant observation or two about the state of race relations in contemporary America. At one point, a Sikh man complains about airport hassles, and Frazier promptly suggests that the man probably never had a problem catching a cab ride.

Inside Man

Grade: B+

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe

Screenplay: Russell Gewirtz

Rating: R; violence, profanity

Running time: 128 min.

[Last modified March 22, 2006, 12:55:43]