I Didn't Care For It

Rating: 3/10 (28 January 2012)

Generally speaking I enjoy Denzel Washington's movies, but - while I acknowledge that most people really liked this - "Inside Man" just didn't hit home with me. It started out with some promise, as a mysterious group of robbers attempt to take over a bank, seizing a number of hostages. Washington plays a detective sent to be the chief police negotiator. The robbers are violent and seem to mean business. Into the mix is added Jodie Foster's character of Madeleine - a strange and largely unexplained character who's doing some sort of dirty work for both the Mayor of New York (where this is set) and for Arthur Case - the chairman of the board of the bank (played by Christopher Plummer) - who clearly has something from his past stored in a safety deposit box at the bank that needs to be kept hidden.
With the bank robbery and hostage taking this seemed to be going in the right direction. Somehow, though, the whole subplot around Case's background didn't really interest me, and Foster's character was (for my liking) too ill-defined to be really interesting. Admittedly, by about halfway through this I was completely lost and found that I was enjoying it less and less as it went along. It turns out to be one of the few movies starring Denzel Washington that I really didn't care for. (3/10)