Inside Man-The Bank Robbery that Never Was? ***

Rating: 7/10 (23 August 2006)

The film starts off as another "Dog Day Afternoon," and for those of you who remember, "Violent Saturday."
Yes, a bank is allegedly robbed and hostages are taken. Something is terribly wrong when the chief inspector, Denzel Washington, provokes the gang leader, Clive Owen to shoot one of the hostages. There is plenty of screaming and yelling by the shaken hostages. A Jewish woman refers to the gang as Mishagunim(crazies) when they tell the victims to undress. We have an assortment of people in the bank of all different ethnicities.
Christopher Plummer is the bank's Board Executive who has a terrible dark secret hidden in one of the vaults. He sends in executive Jodie Foster to pay off the gang. They leave and the hostages are thrown to the ground and are forced on a bus by the police.
We have a racist cop who would rather live to be an old aged bigot as compared to a young dead liberal and a Sikh bank employee who is harassed by the police when he is freed and a hint of the bank's collaboration with the Nazis during World War 11.
The movie begins to falter once the hostages were released without incident and it is shown that the gang used fake guns, bullets and took no money whatsoever. What's going on here you ask? A good caper goes awry at the end.