a strange turn for Lee...

Rating: 5/10 (11 April 2006)

Opening center screen, our mastermind lays out the deal; who, what, when where, why and how. He's cool, calm and collected; you can see the gears ticking in his mind. Dalton Russell has planned the perfect heist. Confidently walking into the bank with his colleagues, they cut security and take all customers hostage. Making the hostages wearing painters uniform, people are unaware who are the hostages from the perpetrators.Called onto the case is Detective Keith Frazier. Handling the situation like other heist, Frazier lets Dalton sit. Soon Frazier smells something wrong; Dalton isn't interested in money; he has something better planned. Owner of the bank, Arthur Case, hires Madeline White. Case has personal belongings stored in a safety deposit box, which he feels might be compromised, which he wants Madeline to protect.
Spike Lee has become synonymous with film of racial intolerance. Deceiding to make a genre film of a heist comes as a welcome change for Lee. Screen writer Russell Gewirtz has created a master plan for the heist, and worked out how it will play; yet there lies the conundrum. From a perfect start, Inside Man starts to split the seams on Spike Lee's inability to not venture away from making a film without making a statement. Inside Man could have been a perfectly constructed genre film, but the injections on race, tolerance, religion force Inside Man to collapse upon itself.
Inside looses a lot of focus as it moves along. It doesn't really know what type of film it wants to be. The conflicting context between the heist and the racial intolerance fight with each other, instead of work together. By the end it doesn't really matter, as either of the conflicting side wont surrender; creating a rather muddled film.
Over confidence can easily be said about all the actors. Denzel Washington playing the same sort of character again has become redundant; yet hard truth is he does it so well. Clive Owen is cool and calm as Dalton, yet doesn't feel like a mastermind behind this plan. Jodie Foster is disappointingly underused as Madeline, so to with Christopher Plummer as Arthur. Willem Dafoe flounders in the background, it looks like he doesn't know why he's there. Chiwetel Ejiofor delivers one of the better performance, yet not his best from his other recent film.
What started off as a perfect crime, soon becomes a crime itself.