One of the best crime thrillers of recent years

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2010)

A group of robbers, disguised as painters, storm into a bank in New York and take all the customers and bank employees hostage. The police arrive and surround the bank and a battle of wits begins between Detective Keith Frazier, the chief police negotiator, and Dalton Russell, the leader of the robbers. At first it seems that the police hold all the advantages. The robbers are trapped in the basement of the bank, and the police can listen to their conversations using bugs. A team of armed police are ready to storm the bank should any of the hostages be harmed, the only exit is covered, and it seems that the only way the robbers can leave is by surrendering.
Gradually, however, we realise that the situation is rather more complicated. Russell is clearly a highly intelligent man who has planned the robbery meticulously and seems able to predict the police's every move. It becomes clear that Russell has a clever escape plan; what is less clear is exactly what he and his gang hope to steal. There is also a subplot involving Madeleine White, a fixer hired by Arthur Case, the founder and president of the bank, to negotiate with the robbers for the safe return of certain documents which Case is anxious should remain secret.
Back in the days of the Production Code, crime dramas had a simple moral code; the cops (who always won) were the good guys and the robbers (who always lost) the bad guys. The modern heist film, exemplified by something like "Ocean's Eleven", has an equally simple code of morality, or rather amorality; greed is good, crime does pay, the robbers are the heroes and the cops are only introduced so that they can be outwitted.
"Inside Man" may, technically, be a heist movie, but it avoids relying on either a simple morality or a simple amorality; it recognises that the distinction between good and evil may be a complex one, but that it nevertheless exists. The existence of shades of grey does not mean that there is no such thing as black or white. Certainly, the characters in the film cannot be sharply divided into good and bad. There is a distinction drawn between Frazier and his police colleague Captain John Darius. Darius wants to storm the bank and overpower the robbers by force; Frazier prefers a more peaceful, negotiated resolution to the standoff. This does not, however, mean that Frazier is the whiter-than-white "hero" of the film; we learn that he is under suspicion for corruption and malpractice.
Case seems to the outside world to be a model citizen; he is a close friend of the mayor and famous for his philanthropy. We learn, however, that the secret he is trying to protect is that during the war he was in some way guilty of collaboration with the Nazis and founded the bank with the money he received from them for his services. His philanthropic work has been undertaken in an attempt to assuage his guilty conscience over these dealings; part of Russell's motives for organising the robbery is a desire to expose Case's past crimes.
I felt that the film's "Nazi" angle was a weakness. Christopher Plummer, who plays Case, would only have been ten years old when the war broke out and sixteen when it finished. We must therefore either assume that Case is much older than the actor who is playing him (Plummer would have been 77 in 2006) or that he was only a child when he worked with the Nazis and only 19 when he founded his bank. There seems to be a tendency on the part of writers to reach automatically for the Nazis to serve as a symbol of ultimate evil, regardless of plausibility.
That point apart, however, I found little else to criticise in the film, except that I thought that Madeleine White should have been given a bigger part in order to make the best use of that excellent actress Jodie Foster. There is some very good acting, especially from Denzel Washington (Frazier), Willem Dafoe (Darius) and even from Clive Owen, an actor whom I have not always admired in the past, as Russell.
Director Spike Lee brings a certain gritty realism to the proceedings. By the term "realism" I do not mean that real-life criminals necessarily behave like the ones depicted; rather I mean that I found it much easier to accept the characters and situations shown here as realistic than I did while watching, say, "Ocean's Eleven", and even more its sequel "Ocean's Twelve", which never seemed anything other than fantasies with about as much connection to reality as a Mickey Mouse cartoon. I think that Lee was the right director for the film; I cannot imagine Ron Howard, the original choice, producing something so hard-edged. (Howard's films often have a certain soft-centred sentimentality about them). Russell Gewirtz's intelligent, thought-provoking screenplay is several degrees better than those normally associated with action-oriented thrillers. "Inside Man" is one of the best crime thrillers of recent years. 8/10