At first glance, "Inside Man" seems like a fairly standard paint-by-numbers heist movie. It still seems that way at second glance too. But the familiarity of its conventions can't dull the sparkle of the film itself, which embraces its cinematic roots with such pulpy delight that it took me a long time to notice the sharp social commentary curling around its edges.
"Inside Man" begins routinely enough -- four criminals in white masks walk off the street into a New York City bank, yank out AK-47s, and go through the standard bank robber protocol of tossing smoke grenades, yelling at the frightened customers to "get on the goddamn floor!" and so forth.
Their leader is played by Clive Owen, whose Cockney accent fights for air beneath an affected American drawl and who, with his glowering stare and throaty growl, is the first truly frightening onscreen bad guy of the year. Owen informs us in his opening monologue of his intent to execute "the perfect bank robbery." Now that's a tall order even for a movie villain, and wouldn't you know it, before long a police squadron arrives on the scene led by Detective Keith Frazier (an enjoyably loose Denzel Washington) who aims to put the criminals' plans on ice. Unfortunately for Frazier, the robbers just happen to have a bank full of hostages at their disposal.
At this point, we have little indication that "Inside Man" is shaping up to be anything more than yet another typical cops-and-robbers flick. But soon clues begin to surface suggesting that there's mischief afoot behind the scenes. Who, for example, is this shadowy figure named Madeline White (played by Jodie Foster at her most gloriously angular) that pulls up outside the bank in the mayor of New York's limousine and demands to be put in charge? What is the secret in that safe deposit box which the bank's president (Christopher Plummer) seems so desperate to conceal? And why, if their goal is to rob the bank, do the criminals seem so disinterested in actually taking the money?
I cannot reveal the answers to these questions. What I can tell you is that there is far more to "Inside Man" than meets the eye. For all its shiny production values, the film is still very much a Spike Lee joint right down to its very bones. When the final secret has been revealed the movie unmasks itself as one of Lee's trademark social morality tales, repackaged as a genre picture with a labyrinthine plot.
In an age when most urban thrillers are filmed in Toronto for tax purposes, we can see why Lee insisted on shooting in his native New York City. The gritty authenticity of the locale heightens the sense of urban angst which buzzes beneath the surface of the story.
There is, of course, a level at which this is all perfectly ridiculous. Certain scenes are never explained, a few of the twists don't make sense and a key plot point depends on us accepting that Christopher Plummer is 20 years older than he actually is. But who cares? I have no objection to a thriller that doesn't quite add up in the end, so long as it is executed with enough enthusiasm to patch over the cracks in the plot for the length of its running time. Compare "Inside Man" to last month's "Firewall," another wildly implausible thriller about hostage-taking bank robbers. Both films are riddled with enough plot holes to sink a ship, but whereas "Firewall" was such a lethargic affair that all we could do was meditate on its illogic, "Inside Man" moves at such an energetic clip that by the time we notice its preposterousness, it's too late to care.
The screenplay, by promising first-timer Russell Gerwitz, contains subtle nods to the great crime thrillers of the '70s like "Dog Day Afternoon," but has an original voice all its own; the hard-boiled dialogue of the characters, at once snappy and hyper-realistic, burns like fire all the way down.
Denzel Washington seizes upon the language, endowing Frazier with a cocky Brooklyn dialect that comes off as simultaneously charming and hard-ass. Listen to the scene where the cops deliver a truckload of pizzas to the door of the bank at the request of the hungry robbers; Frazier tells the crooks to "have a nice day," but you can hear the string of unspoken profanity beneath his words.
With "Inside Man," Lee has managed to take an assembly-line plot and imprint upon it his signature vision, using a familiar set-up to tell a story that sizzles with its own unique style. For all its twists and turns, the film never really amounts to a whole lot more than the conventional crime thriller it appears to be, but don't movies this good exist to remind us why they became conventional in the first place?
