Inside Man is Spike Lee’s most mainstream project yet; after some years of generally marginal projects, few of which seemed to succeed completely, he has made a fully-fledged Hollywood movie — and a genre picture, moreover. Apart from his generally unpredictable career, it’s hard to see what precisely excited Lee about this idea. Why, from an auteur who has consistently tackled racial and other contentious issues in the American body politic, do a heist movie?
Lee has said it was the script by Russell Gewirtz that attracted him, and a good script it is — despite the tendency to go on just a little too long, and a central implausibility that may, in some viewers’ minds, cause the whole thing to unravel. Still, it has a consistently intriguing storyline with lots of clever twists, and it’s packed with sparky dialogue. As heist movies go, Inside Man may be no less inherently fatuous than most, but compare it to a recent hit: Inside Man is to Ocean’s Eleven as whisky is to champagne. Certainly, it is a gripping story that unfolds its secrets with skill.
First we get a declaration to camera from Clive Owen, playing a man called Dalton Russell, who explains the bank robbery that will form the bulk of the movie’s narrative. It is, he says immodestly, the perfect crime. Then we flash back to see his team infiltrating the bank, and the robbery begins. As the film progresses through the story of the robbery, though, it complicates itself by jumping forward to the interrogation of suspects and hostages by the police, and this backward-looking commentary adds another layer of complexity to the plot, providing a perspective from the storyline’s end that asks questions about precisely what went on during the heist.
If that sounds overly intricate, rest assured that it all works on screen. This is not quite The Usual Suspects, but it’s in that league of dextrous plotting. And we’re not stuck, either, in the bank with the robbers and the hostages, or outside with the police-persons on the job — the usual back-and-forth that forms the structure of such movies. Gewirtz gives us, too, some additional material to chew on with the introduction of Jodie Foster as a mysterious fixer who is called in by the bank’s owner (Christopher Plummer) to assist.
The presence of Foster, Owen and Plummer gives another clue as to why Lee might have seen Gewirtz’s script as an excellent vehicle for an atypical Lee movie. He is clearly able, with the help of the right script, to attract major star power to his movie projects. Denzel Washington has worked with Lee several times, and he’s back for Inside Man, giving an engaging, easy-going performance that’s nice to see after some rather agonised roles of late. But there are also several faces new to Lee’s oeuvre — Willem Dafoe, for one, and the British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who did so well in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and even, rather thanklessly, played a South African in Red Dust.
So Inside Man is not what one would have expected of Lee, and in many ways doesn’t feel like “a Spike Lee joint”, as he calls his productions. Except you have to note the sly way the issue of race (especially in post-9/11 New York) is introduced, how prejudice in general is something the characters find themselves talking about and dealing with as a matter of course. That consciousness gives Inside Man some grit without making it any less of a big, glossy thriller that isn’t groundbreaking but is very watchable indeed.