Spike Lee Chooses His Words Very Carefully...

Rating: 8/10 (24 March 2006)

Have you ever heard someone play the first seven notes of a piano scale... and then stop? It's irritating isn't it? Spike Lee's "Inside Man" is like a spectacular flash of lightning and the moments immediately after when you are waiting for a thunderous boom... and you wait, and wait, and wait, only to realize that it's not coming.
One could safely describe this film as the anatomy of a perfect heist... A bank robbery so perfectly planned that it almost reeks of being too good to be possible. It is the set-up, the execution, the police response, the interplay between the two, the sub-plots and typical Spike Lee touches that make this film one of the finest three-quarters of a film this year. It is just that darn final act which fizzles in comparison to the electric build-up.
Clive Owen is rigidly organized and controlled as the mastermind of this bank robbing team. The plan seems simple enough... Dress the team as painters, enter a Manhattan bank branch, overpower the patrons and employees and take the loot. Right? Wrong. It's never that easy, otherwise they wouldn't have made a film about it.
Once inside, the cops swarm the exterior, led by the 1950's film-noir-styled detective played with debonair cool and muffled intensity by Denzel Washington. He is an ambitious cop with legal troubles of his own and he knows that this hostage negotiation could be his big break.
Christopher Plummer plays the founder and CEO of the bank in question. He is under extreme duress when hearing of the heist because of some very secretive safety deposit box contents that could damage his reputation. He hires Jodie Foster's Madeleine White, a facilitator of solutions to such problems.
The story unfolds in ways that would be unfair of me to divulge to first time viewers. Needless to say, there is a David Mamet like complexity to the proceedings that allows for twists and turns and misdirection.
The cast is stellar. Washington, Owen and Foster are all in fine form, each delivering a character with wit and insight and each possessing a different kind of power. There is confidence brimming over in this cast. No one feels out of place.
What is absolutely brilliant about this film is the way in which Spike Lee manages to build the film to such a crescendo using a very familiar formula. One of the characters even references the classic seventies flick, "Dog Day Afternoon". Lee manages to craft virtually everything for the first ninety minutes to perfection. No detail or plot hole is left to bother us. The viewer is crystal clear what is happening and we get a good sense of where every character resides during this stand-off.
The only thing we don't know is how the film is going to resolve itself. Unfortunately, it is at that point that we start to realize that Spike Lee may have the same problem. I will not give anything away in regards to the plot, but I will say that the final act is untidy and unsatisfying considering the meticulousness of the build-up.
I want to stress that I am absolutely not clamoring for a typical Hollywood ending here. A shoot-out would not be the way to end such crafty thriller. What is needed is a crisp re-write to clarify the positions of all involved... especially the Jodie Foster character.
I felt like I was waiting for that chill-down-my-spine moment that never came. The big reveal. Instead, the film felt slightly anticlimactic and predetermined... Like there was nothing at stake all along. I am giving the film a strong grade in spite of that final fade because it had the makings of one of the best films of the year up until that point.
TC Candler IndependentCritics.com