Absorbing but unsatisfying

Rating: 7/10 (30 June 2011)

Spike Lee's 'Inside Man', a film about hostage-taking bank robbers in New York, at one point name-checks 'Dog Day Afternoon', another film with a similar subject matter. But whereas that film, as with Lee's own early work, was an authentic portrait of the hard lives of ordinary Americans, 'Inside Man' is high-grade tosh. Lee can do this sort of thing, he even does it quite well, but there's a fundamental shallowness here: the motiveless criminal, the super-cool, super-connected Miss Fixit, the evil banker who once did a deal with the Nazis (and I'm no friend of the Nazis, but the use of "Nazi" as a convenient shorthand for an evil which cannot be questioned and which is by definition completely different to the evil of any other customer who any other banker might conceivably have dealt with is typical of the laziness of the film's grander concepts, however well worked out the details). Moreover, the essential trick of the movie is intrinsically undramatic, and the film's structure is highly constrained as Lee attempts to extract some impact from the idea. Overall, it's absorbing but not quite satisfying; with little substance below the surface.