Review of Inside Man (2006) by Joshc. — 16 Sep 2007
Lee, for one, is long beyond his days as a civic provocateur and voice for the radical social world. Like John Singleton, he may have found his legs as a pulp manufacturer whose least arguable claim to fame is that he can do fast, funny, attitudinal genre films better than Tony Scott.
Washington and Foster, for their parts, are merely dukes in a sick kingdom, taking what roles they're offered for people their age (and sex) just to keep their careers afloat in the public brain-pan.
Lee is playing the genre like a board game, and his film is a sniggering riff, filled with hyperbolic New York stereotypes, sexist jokes, puns, scattershot commentary on racial profiling and smug banter.
As bogus in its way as Richard Donner's 16 Blocks, Inside Man has an even more irritating disrespect for the verities of police work and for the emotional life of urban Americans. There are a few rousing achievements on the table, in particular a comical police debate--instigated by a faux riddle tossed by Owen, about trains, U.
S. currency and Grand Central Station--as well as a fast joke involving a Sikh hostage who, outraged by profiling, acknowledges that yes, he can easily hail a cab in Mid-Eastern-cabbie-saturated New York.
But heist films are hardly what they used to be; for decades, they were a vehicle for postwar desperation and fatalism, and today the genre has an empty tank of frisson to offer without film noir's acknowledgment of doom.
The difference between, say, Stanley Kubrick's 1956 masterpiece The Killing and contemporary daydreams like Inside Man is the difference between a luckless hell on earth and a dull weekend in the Poconos.
This review of Inside Man (2006) was written by Joshc. on 16 Sep 2007.
Inside Man has generally received very positive reviews.
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