Whip-smart, arresting and far more fleet-footed than a two-hour plus running time ought to allow, The Inside Man is a storming heist movie from Spike Lee, perhaps not the first name one expects to find on a lavishly budgeted action thriller.
Cruising along on hard boiled quips (“I got them right where I want them – right behind me with my pants below my ankles”), plot twists and a hopped-up melting pot score (big bad Bond sweeps wander into the ever jaunty world music section), The Inside Man sees detective under fire Denzel Washington pitch his wits against Clive Owen’s criminal mastermind as the latter attempts to stage ‘the perfect bank robbery’. During hostage negotiations, Denzel realises something is amiss (‘Hasn’t this guy seen Dog Day Afternoon?’) and his suspicions are further aroused by the sudden arrival of interested third and fourth parties, including bank owner Christopher Plummer (rarely a good omen) and his vicious sidekick Jodie Foster (never more pinch-faced than here).
Though this thundering cop show nirvana never quite gets around to revisiting the agitprop of Get On The Bus or Bamboozled, it is, very recognisably, a Spike Lee joint. A vast multi-ethnic cast, including Lee regulars such as Denzel and Kim Director, lend something of Do The Right Thing’s interracial spark, if not the full fireworks display, and inevitably post-9/11 realpolitik adds a new volatility to Lee’s central preoccupation. In one scene a Sikh mistakenly identified as an Arab - as in ‘Holy shit, it’s an Arab’ – receives extra ‘attention’ from arresting officers. Later, Denzel witheringly urges a mouthy colleague to “turn down the colour commentary.”
Squeezing all New York life into a form characterised by its claustrophobic tendencies (we rarely escape the racetrack in The Killing or the warehouse in Reservoir Dogs) The Inside Man contains enough bustle and discontent to rocket-boost this movie and may be several others besides. It’s genre kids, but not as we know it.