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Category:    Home > Reviews > Thriller > Heist > The Inside Man (Theatrical Film Review)

The Inside Man

 

Stars: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Plummer

Director: Spike Lee

Critic's rating: 7 out of 10

 

Review by Chuck O'Leary

 

Spike Lee's The Inside Man puts a fresh spin on the heist/hostage thriller, while retaining enough of the cynical New York City attitude that made Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) so memorable.

 

Although it never quite reaches the level of those '70s classics, it exhibits a lot more personality and wit than most commercial movies coming out of Hollywood these days, and for that alone we should be thankful.

 

In its smart, knowing dialogue, The Inside Man is a welcome throwback to the urban crime films of '70s, a time before the plastic Mall Movie mentality took over, and even the most mainstream of movies were populated with the kind of grizzled characters who've seen it all and who've seen too much.

 

Like fellow filmmakers raised in and still living in NYC, Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet, Lee knows the Big-Apple melting pot and its denizens inside out from years of personal experience.  While the NYC films of other directors, like, for instance, Richard Donner's current 16 Blocks, are filmed in Canada and seem manufactured in their grittiness, Lee's latest, which was actually filmed in NYC, feels a lot closer to capturing the real spirit of America's biggest metropolis.

 

Like Dog Day Afternoon and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Inside Man concerns an attempted robbery in NYC, the subsequent hostage situation that develops, and the varying reactions of a cross-section of New Yorkers.

 

When four or five masked armed robbers led by mystery man Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) seize a Wall Street bank, take about 40 or 50 hostages and demand a plane out of the country, it seems like Dog Day Afternoon all over again with a decidedly more cunning brand of criminal.  A veteran detective named Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington, in his fourth Lee film to date), who himself is under investigation within his own department for theft, is called in with his partner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to lead the negotiations. 

 

But when a shadowy, icy professional "fixer" named Miss White (Jodie Foster) gets hired by bank founder and CEO Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) to intercede, it becomes increasingly clear to Frazier that this is no ordinary robbery with no ordinary motive.

 

Three quarters of the film unfold as a series of intense confrontations during the actual robbery interspersed with flash-forwards to Frazier's often-colorful interrogations of surviving hostages, which account for some great offhand moments.  Unlike so many other movies, where filmmakers merely and blandly just seem to be marking time between action sequences, The Inside Man is most alive during the fractious little moments where characters are simply interacting.

 

Lee's direction is unusually observant of human behavior for a film that's ostensibly a thriller with a clever twist, and even the supporting players who have only a handful of lines are distinctly drawn and very well cast.  It's Lee's interest in the small moments that makes The Inside Man above average, and his best film since Summer of Sam (1999).  But it's not without shortcomings.  One character is too obviously a villain from the moment they appear on screen due to the reversed stereotypes of modern-day Hollywood, the story's outcome is eventually too contrived to be believed, and things take too much time to wrap up in the last quarter.

 

Those flaws notwithstanding, The Inside Man is as well acted as expected by this superior group of actors, and is directed with a lot more nuance by Lee than most major-studio films of today.  And even though its plot is highly unlikely once the pieces of the puzzle come together, it is refreshingly realistic in the sense that its characters often act with the kind of self-preserving self-interest people often do in real life -- something most contemporary movies avoid in favor of clichéd, feel-good epiphanies.


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