Above average heist movie, but flawed

Rating: 6/10 (15 October 2008)

Inside Man tries hard to be a smart, thinking man's heist movie. It does contain some clever ideas, but it has enough flaws that it does not leave you completely satisfied on further reflection, the way a truly brilliant bank robbery film would.
Much of the plot centers on a cat and mouse game between Detective Frazier (Denzel Washington) and Dalton Russell (Clive Owen). Russell conceives of a brilliant bank job that he believes will succeed. Early in the film he takes hostages, and Frazier is called on to free them and to nab Russell and his accomplices. Meanwhile, there are other things going on outside the bank that Russell is not aware of, which is where Jodie Foster's character comes in.
A lot of the tricks in the robbery (slowly revealed over the course of the film) are indeed brilliant, if perhaps all are not entirely plausible in real life.
The letdown comes from the non-criminals. First, Frazier repeatedly acts in ways that seem quite hard to believe from a trained hostage negotiator. His first verbal exchange with Russell is not at all the measured way of establishing rapport that you would expect. At times Frazier shows flashes of brilliance, but equally often he ends up looking like he is out of his depth, needlessly gambling with the lives of dozens of people for no real gain.
Jodie Foster makes a brave effort, but her character is just not very believable. Due to the fairly cheesy lines and situations she is involved with, she ends up looking more like a plot device than an actual person.
In the end, the film is certainly no turkey, but there are better caper films out there with better scripts.