Inside Man

PJ Neilan

Give Spike Lee a reasonable budget and you expect something thought provoking, intelligent, brimming with racial disharmony and peppered with caustic, darkly funny dialogue. At least that’s what one would think. It’s not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with this new ‘Spike Lee joint’, it’s just that given its genre (heist movie), it’s location (Noo Yawk), and it’s actors (Washington, Foster, Dafoe, Owen), it’s just all so bloody average.

The film opens with a piece-to-camera from Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), introducing the film in a Shakespearean-style soliloquy. We then see the heist being executed with the requisite dash of panache, style and cold efficiency that we expect from a competent heist movie. Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) is a hostage negotiator, with New York’s finest, and after some brief exposition involving his beautiful girlfriend and her hoodlum brother, Frazier and his partner get wind of a bank robbery at the swish Manhattan Trust Bank, downtown. This particular bank, along with many others, is owned by slimy suit Christopher Plummer, and when he hears about the robbery he calls on reptilian corporate ‘problem-solver’ Jodie Foster, to make sure the secret he has secured in a safety deposit box in the aforementioned bank, is kept extremely far away from the public eye.
This McGuffin, as Hitchcock would have called it, is only one of the silly glitches in this rather enjoyable piece of fluff. Why did Plummer hold onto something as incriminating as this? What’s the deal with Clive Owen’s wildly wavering accent? How does Denzel keep his moustache looking so damn neat? All these are legitimate, but unanswered questions.

Lee’s talents, and the actor’s performances, are what save this movie from disappearing out of your mind mere seconds after leaving the cinema. The camerawork dominates many scenes, with one glorious wide shot of Owen entering the vault for the first time, coupled with a Mean Streets-style fixed shot of Denzel ‘gliding’ toward the bank after a hostage is killed. Lee tries to modernise things with an uncomfortable amount of Apple product placement, a nod to Amazon, and a mention of 50cent, in a scene portraying Owen’s shock at the ultra violence of a child hostage’s videogame. There are a few heavy-handed racial references, such as a Sikh being mistaken for an Arab, and a scene in which a cop, while telling Washington of the time he was shot by a black child, exclaims: “I’d rather be an old bigot than a young corpse”. But these feel too much like Spike trying to grab you and pull you out of the average and breezy air of the film.

But as I said earlier, the acting is what saves it. Washington, even on autopilot, is thoroughly watchable, with a variety of idiosyncrasies and tics that would make Brad Pitt convulse with envy. He saved Out of Time from bland land with a cracking performance, and is easily the most consistent actor around. Owen is excellent, despite the occasionally dodgy accent. Foster is obviously enjoying the empowerment of her role. Plummer is, of course, wonderfully insidious, and Willem Dafoe pops up to do bugger all, except be Willem Dafoe, which is good enough for me. Even Chiwetel Ejiofor, from the wonderful ‘Dirty Pretty Things’, does a solid job as Denzel’s hip partner (while out-accenting Clive Owen). The script crackles along with some clever one-liners (“last time I had my Johnson pulled this good it cost me five bucks”), and films like ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘Serpico’ are smirkingly name-checked. The self-awareness and knowing dialogue also help to save a film that, when broken down to its skeleton, is a fairly straightforward, conventional, and occasionally smart thriller, directed by a master of the art.