Spike Lee finds ‘Inside Man’ in new heist thriller
By Tom Beppler, Staff Writer
Posted on March 30, 2006

Spike Lee’s filmmaking career has, until quite recently, existed primarily in the muckraking realm. “Do the Right Thing” (1989) was a story about prejudice on the hottest day of the summer, “Jungle Fever” (1991) addressed interracial romances, “Malcolm X” (1992) encapsulated the life of the black nationalist and human rights activist, “He Got Game” (1998) exposed collegiate recruiting programs, and so on. 

Now the director of those films has made “Inside Man,” a bank-heist thriller that means only to please, not to lecture. All messages and Statements have been subverted: social commentary and rants — there are still a few sharp instances of each — have nonetheless been muffled in order to accommodate the conventions of this quite mainstream and commercial suspense picture. It is mostly a success.

The film’s chief virtue lies in the craft of its players: “Inside Man” is magnificently acted. Dalton Russell (played by Clive Owen, “Derailed”) is the ringleader of a group of bank robbers who seize hostages and barricade themselves inside a major New York City bank. Detective Frazier (played by Denzel Washington, “The Manchurian Candidate”) is the police negotiator on the scene, while Madeline White (played by Jodie Foster, “Flightplan”) is a power broker of sorts brought into the story through the bank chairman’s urgent need to protect the mysterious contents of a safety deposit box inside the bank.

The film is intense in its opening and central passages, and by its end has devolved into a merely good hostage thriller, but nothing we haven’t already seen. After the set-up, in which the hostages have been made to costume themselves in outfits and masks identical to their captors, the plot begins to turn on the concept of what exactly Owen and his team are trying to accomplish inside the bank.

Meanwhile, Lee uses the fifty or so captive New Yorkers to explore vignettes of city life.  A Sikh is mistaken for an Arab, and grows angry because his turban has been misplaced; a bank robber disapproves of a young hostage’s violent handheld videogame, called “Kill Dat Nigga!”; and an unfortunate incident arises out of the police confusion over the similar appearance of both criminal and civilian, in which Lee might be subtly commenting on civil liberties in the post-9/11 climate.