Inside Man By Al Kratina Mar 10, 2006 - 11:40:00 AM

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The poster certainly has more white than I'm used to in a Spike Lee joint.

Inside Man
Genres: Crime/Drama
Release Date: March 24
MPAA: Rated R for language and some violent images.
Distributors: Universal Pictures
Director: Spike Lee
Writer: Russell Gewirtz
Cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer

Spike Lee does not know how to direct action movies. Shockingly, however, this turns out to be a good thing. The net result of this unfamiliarity with generic conventions is that Inside Man is not nearly as stupid as it could have been. Nothing in the film, to my knowledge, breaks any of the major laws of physics. No cars crash and flip horizontally in slow motion, and no one at any point is "too old for this s**t". Sadly, during the trailer, Denzel Washington’s character does mention that he is "crazy like a fox", but this line has been redacted from the final cut of the film, in what is possibly the wisest editing decision made in the movie.

Inside Man is a hiest film. Certainly, given Lee's history of making films that matter, or at least are trying to, this would seem to be an odd choice, but yet for the most part, it works. The film focuses on Detective Keith Frazier, played by Washington, who is assigned to a bank robbery in progress. The robbery has degenerated into a hostage situation, but as the film progresses, it becomes clear that this is all part of criminal Dalton Russell’s master plan. That said plan seems needlessly complex, considering all you really need to rob a bank is a pair of sunglasses and a strongly worded note, is incidental. If you go along for the ride and try desperately hard not to figure things out in the first five minutes, in which the film gives you all the information you need to guess the end, you might enjoy yourself.

While the film is missing the heavy-handed social commentary of Lee’s usual work, it’s still distinctively his. He manages to adapt his style to the action film, by throwing in dollies, cranes, and other big-budget camera moves, but there’s the occasional glimpse of his structuralist tendencies, as well as plenty of his naturalistic (read: clumsy) direction of actors in supporting roles. In terms of the leads, Washington is comfortable as Detective Frazier, not surprising considering he’s spent more time playing a cop over the past few years than he has sleeping. Clive Owen is effective in his role as Russell, but playing a master criminal as cold and calculating is, I believe, the third chapter in Acting For Dummies. Christopher Plummer does his best Richard Harris impression as the president of the bank, and Jodie Foster, as a high priced ‘problem-solver’, delivers a predictably strong supporting performance. The script is a little too clever for its own good, coming off just to the right of the fine line between smart and annoying. More troublingly, there’s a half-hour of film left after the heist is over, which ties up all of the character threads but bleeds all the tension out of the movie. What’s worse, the ending seems to reveal that every character is the film is essentially motivated by greed and self-service. But perhaps that just means the heavy-handed social commentary is more present than I expected.

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