Review of Inside Man (2006) by Moviemastereddy — 02 Apr 2016

'Inside Man,' a Crime Caper Starring Denzel Washington.

For most of his career, the great and maddeningly unreliable Spike Lee has been anything but — to borrow the title of his diverting new film — an inside man. Mr. Lee, who hit the scene in the mid-1980's with "She's Gotta Have It," a barbed independent comedy that jump-started the black film movement and made him a national brand, has preferred to be seen as an outside man, a rebel who said what he wanted, when he wanted, far from the industry establishment. To judge from this precision-tooled amusement, Mr. Lee may have missed his calling (one of them, anyway) as a studio hire.

"Inside Man" is a jolt, partly because it comes equipped rather incongruously with the name of Mr. Lee's company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, but mostly because this is the kind of seamless diversion that should be a stock item in Hollywood, but isn't. Much like Richard Donner's recent actioner, "16 Blocks," another effective piece of genre showmanship, "Inside Man" works because it takes a familiar setup — in this case, a Wall Street bank heist that mutates into a hostage crisis — and twists it ever so slightly. A particularly solid screenplay helps here, as do stars who can actually act — this film's holy trinity being Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster — along with an excellent supporting cast and the best lineup of pusses and mugs outside "The Sopranos.".

Here's how it goes down: Mr. Owen stares into the camera and announces that he is about to commit "the perfect bank robbery." Whether his character, Dalton Russell, succeeds is immaterial to how he gets from the first act to the third, which is where Mr. Lee's movie love comes in. This is the least overtly personal of Mr. Lee's films, but it's also his most polished and satisfying work in years, with none of the raggedness that sometimes mars even his best intentions. Taking his cue from the surprising, witty screenplay by the newcomer Russell Gewirtz, the filmmaker frames the heist and subsequent standoff as a really big show — namedropping "Dog Day Afternoon" along the way — then cuts his actors loose and lets them play.

As the action pings between Russell working his wicked ways inside the bank (beating hostages, forcing them to wear unflattering coveralls); Mr. Washington's smooth operator, a veteran detective named Keith Frazier; and Ms. Foster's Madeline White, a fixer hired by the bank, you might find yourself trying to unknot the increasingly tangled plot. Don't bother. Filled with playful noise and nonsense, clever feints and digressions, "Inside Man" has a story to tell, but its most sustained pleasures come from its performances, especially the three leads. To watch Mr. Washington breeze into a scene smooth as silk, smooth as Bogart and Easy Rawlins combined, or to listen to Mr. Owen murmur sweet nothings into the camera, is to experience the ineffable pleasures that only big-screen stars can provide.

Mr. Lee rarely treats his actresses or female characters as well as their male counterparts, but whether by design or neglect, he helps Ms. Foster deliver her wittiest, most relaxed performance in ages. Part Mata Hari, part Ilsa the She Wolf, she stalks the sets in form-fitting suits and nose-bleed heels that show off her spectacular legs wonderfully. (She could kill with those things!) In a story dominated by men, in which most of the women are either desexualized or double-D babes, her character presents an amusing fantasy of female power. One of those mysterioso brokers who circumvent both the law and the criminal element for the deepest pockets in town, Madeline isn't the equal of any man: she's superior. And you thought dominatrixes wore only black leather.

Like everyone else in the film, Madeline seems interested only in getting hers. Russell wants his ill-gotten gains, Detective Frazier wants his promotion, and the bank bigwig (Christopher Plummer) wants his secrets kept — it's a Hobbesian world, after all. Mr. Lee, meanwhile, most likely wants the respect that he has always been due. Consistently underrated and underappreciated, this filmmaker is an erratic talent, if no more so than many ensconced in Hollywood, and his insistence that race matters has cost him dearly with the mainstream (i.e., white) audience. He's right, of course, that race matters, which is why, in between plot points and star turns, he gently and, at times, rather hilariously, insists on reminding us that it does. He may have sublet this "Spike Lee Joint" to out-of-towners, but it's good to see that he hasn't left the neighborhood.