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(More customer reviews)The one note about Spike Lee films is that you're never sure what you're going to get. I'm not really a fan, I find that his films are too convoluted with extraneous detail and somewhat over produced. Inside Man retains all the elements of a solid bank robbery/caper film, whilst also giving us Spike Lee's trademark of gritty, street-wise irreverence.
The problem with Inside Man is that it's impossibly unbelievable with a plot that strains the realms of credibility; combine this with it's over-long running time and you have a film that features some great performances by it's cast - Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Christopher Plummer and Jodie Foster - but ultimately sags a bit in the middle and ends up becoming rather ponderous.
Lee manages to pull off a handful of effective scenes, but he doesn't have the flair to bring the whole movie off with real conviction. An enigmatic master criminal (Owen) - who spends most of the movie wearing a mask - plans and executes a "genius plan" in which he and several masked companions take over a Lower Manhattan bank and brutally seize several dozen of its customers as hostages.
The NYPD negotiator given the task of dealing with these crooks is an affable junior detective, Detective Keith Frazier (Washington) - under a cloud of suspicion from a previous case - he soon surmises that the perpetrators don't actually want the bank's money. Enter smarmy and elegant New York political insider Madeline White (Foster) who knows everybody and even has the ear of the Mayor.
Madeline is hired by the chairman of the bank's board of directors (Plummer) to oversee the crisis and make sure that certain secrets he has in his safe-deposit box stay secret. The bulk of the film involves the standoff between the bank robbers and the NYPD as they try frantically to ensure that the hostages remain safe.
Of course we know the hostages survive because Lee inserts interview footage of them after the heist is over, this device, however, tips off the outcome, dissipates suspense and quickly becomes tiresome. This is just one of the many techniques Lee uses to clutter the movie's structure and prevent the plot from unfolding as quickly as it should.
Obviously, everyone has something to hide, particularly the bank president, but when his past is revealed, it finally appears with a bit of a thud, with the movie going through to much difficulty to arrive at very little. In all fairness, Inside Man has some interesting things to say about race, money, power and the ethics of urban living, particularly in New York and the performances are wonderfully cynical and gritty.
Washington is sexy and strong, Foster is skillfully odious as the icy, sophisticated and amoral Madeline who cares for nothing but chasing big bucks, Owen is morbidly compelling as the determined heavy and Plummer is letter-perfect as the guilt-ridden bank honcho.
Lee, however, just doesn't seem able to bring all the disparate elements of a heist film into a convincing and gratifying whole and in the end; the movie is vaguely unsatisfying and impossibly far-fetched. Mike Leonard August 06.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) (2006)
Academy Award winner Denzel Washington, Academy Award nominee Clive Owen and Academy Award winner Jodie Foster star in this intense and explosive crime thriller. The perfect bank robbery quickly spirals into an unstable and deadly game of cat-and-mouse between a criminal mastermind (Owen), a determined detective (Washington), and a power broker with a hidden agenda (Foster). As the minutes tick by and the situation becomes increasingly tense, one wrong move could mean disaster for any one of them. From acclaimed director Spike Lee comes the edge-of-your-seat, action-packed thriller that The Wall Street Journal calls "a heist film that’s right on the money."
Click here for more information about Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) (2006)
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