Standard twisty-turny thriller but with a brilliantly novel twist of social commentary and humour

Rating: 9/10 (27 March 2006)

This is a great movie... there's very little that can be held against it. Spike Lee has taken what appears to have been your everyday suspenseful thriller and made it into one of the best films of the year thus far. Fast moving but heavy on characterisation, thrilling and suspenseful but playful and clever, socially aware but seldom preachy and always with a wry undercurrent of brilliantly unexpected humour, all in all this film kicks ass!
To sum up the basic plot: Clive Own is the man who has planned the perfect bank robbery, you know this because he tells you he's done it, the only question is whether we're hearing him before or after the heist... The principle is fairly simple. Along with three other masked associates he has developed a scheme that is supposedly full proof, involving misdirection, the creation of chaos and the possibility for great reward in more ways than one... Denzel Washington, along with the excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor as his partner, is the black detective tasked with overseeing hostage negotiations. Willem Dafoe is the put upon police captain in charge of the whole goddamn mess, Peter Kybart is the very put upon mayor of New York dragged in to proceedings, Christopher Plummer is the very rich owner of the bank with a very guilty secret buried there (he is also fairly put upon) and Jody Foster is, quite frankly, the horrendous bitch employed by Plummer to keep his secret safe. She does much of the putting onto the other characters...
All the players, aside from Foster who appears to be having the time of her life playing the opposite to all those sensitive souls thrust onto her since Taxi Driver, are on very familiar territory and they clearly enjoy their roles, perhaps with the exception Plummer, thanks mainly to the numerous jokes, gags and other material they get to perform in front of, where I watched it, a cinema packed to the rafters. Whoever produced this film (Universal I think) has really gone all out to get the punters in and it helped the movie a great deal. Having a full house encouraged that kind of group bond where the jokes and situations appear that bit funnier.
It could be that phenomenon which made me enjoy Inside Man so much, but I certainly didn't mind the obvious plot holes and massive leaps of faith required of our suspension of disbelief. At any one point in this movie the various protagonists would be undone by one single person failing to act absolutely according to plan... this includes both Denzel Washington and Clive Owen, whose characters are both on extremely thin ice... Owen due to becoming a hostage taking bank robber and Washington because of a recent question over some missing funds from a case he worked.
However, I was totally prepared to accept the ludicrousness of the situations presented to us, which was highly unusual for me. The reason? Spike Lee. The self styled king of modern, black, American political cinema takes the hackneyed plot of just another thriller and turns it into a massive diatribe against the hypocrisy of modern New Yorkers. Instead of the colour blind, metropolitan city the Big Apple is currently portrayed as, in recent years, where films suggesting all isn't right socially are seen as either trying to blacken a good city's name or as years behind the times, Lee uses this new medium, for him, of the thriller to turn an eye on what he sees in the New York of 2006.
The cops are mostly racist, bigoted and incompetent, attitudes Washington and Ejiofor's characters are not exempt from. At various points during the movie the police show extreme measures against hostages who are simply honest citizens of New York, perhaps best summed up with their taking down of a dark skinned bank teller ('My God, it's an Arab!' 'I'm not an Arab I'm a Sikh...!'). Similarly, the various women involved do not enjoy a fun time with New York's finest either. Funnily enough, though, for a man so interested in modern, ignored bigotry, Lee fails to offer any moments where homosexuals are involved in proceedings. It could be that this is deliberate and that New York really has become totally acceptant of gay men and women... or there could be another reason for the absence. Regardless, the lack of a particular branch of intolerance is in no way felt at the time due to the constant bombardment on the numerous divides that still exist between the two sexes and the numerous racial groups... as one police sergeant very aptly puts it; 'I'd rather be an old bigot than a handsome corpse...!' this said, of course, to that hero of good, honest, black characters, Denzel Washington!
Inside Man is resplendent with these images, angles and wry amusement. Laugh out loud moments are plentiful and the overall story arc is quick enough to maintain an interest without sacrificing on developing an empathy between the audience and the protagonists. Lee has taken his shot at a mainstream piece of cinema and has most likely satisfied an adequate commercial cross section of the audience without alienating or betraying his political roots. This film is altogether excellent and the acting, though unlikely to trouble anyone next awards season, is in tune with the piece. Similarly we have a director reigning in his most ardent voice but not silencing it completely, allowing a very fresh perspective on a standard and lacklustre genre. This gives us a whole new look at two simultaneously over and under subscribed subjects: the thriller and the modern New York city. To my mind it was high time we had both! All in all I highly recommend Inside Man.