Review of “The Inside Man”
Spike Lee seems to have had some fun with this, his most commercial film. It’s a sharp, witty heist-and-hostage drama stashed full of stars, good lines and great performances, mostly thanks to an inspired script from first time feature writer Russell Gewirtz.
Denzel Washington is Detective Frazier, a New York cop with a credibility issue who is selected to deal with a “hostage situation” in a downtown bank. Once the building is surrounded with the usual sharpshooters and police barriers, Frazier starts the negotiations. As the action cuts from inside the bank with its terrified hostages and gun-toting robbers, to outside with the police desperately searching for solutions, to a series of interviews that take place after the heist is over, we slowly become aware that the motive for the hold up is about as clear as the blood that might be spilled. And just to stir the plot along, in the midst of the cat-and-mouse games, bank owner Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) calls in a power-dressing negotiator (Jodie Foster) to cut a secret deal with the mastermind (Clive Owen). The possibilities for who is doing what to whom and why, and the surprises that keep turning up, ensure you stay glued to your seat.
The style is slick and the pace mostly clips along, although the last thirty minutes of tidying up the sub-plots could be tightened. This is a far cry from the usually politically motivated Lee, and he has clearly enjoyed the genre - the humour extending to some truly bizarre moments of fun he plays with camera, and with the choice of opening music. But he doesn’t miss the opportunity to have a tilt at some of his favourite topics – in one scene a young boy plays a video game called Kill Dat Nigga, in another Frazier gives a white policeman a lesson in racial linguistics.
All four big names – Washington, Owen, Plummer and Foster – play with their wonderfully cutting lines to great effect, and the characters bump and jolt off each other in a competition where the stakes get higher with each twisting step. The result is a very clever film, where a wry smile is valued as much as a turn of the plot, and a lot more than a blazing gun or a dead body. You could easily watch this twice.
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