Inside Man opens with Bollywood music. I kid you not. But there are not, thankfully, any Bollywood dance numbers, so it's all good. In fact, other than the intro music and a few other little stumbles, it's really spectacularly done. It's a smart movie full of smart characters, where ingenious plans and witty repartee abound. This is also a movie that encourages you to think, and if you want to keep up with the intrigue, you really have to.
The movie does not dilly dally with needless exposé -- after the opening credits, the robbers are already walking through the bank's front doors. They take out all obstacles with extreme precision, and in short order we have the hostage situation that will spur the action of the rest of the film. Enter Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), a negotiator trying to redeem himself after some money went `missing' on his last case. He must match wits with the robbers (Steve, Stevie, Steve-O and their ringleader, Dalton, played by Clive Owen), and later the manipulative Madeline White (Jodie Foster), to not only save the hostages but uncover the real reason behind this heist.
Inside Man is one of the best-written and best-directed thrillers I have seen in a long time. This is the first screenplay for Russell Gewirtz, and it bodes well for his work to come. The story is as complicated as it needs to be, with incremental perturbations to keep things interesting until the final revelation. Even the sequences outside the bank were bearable -- a few scenes that would have chronologically gone in this post-action slump are instead interspersed with scenes of the robbery itself. Not only are we saved the extra drag, the out-of-order information makes it a lot more interesting to figure out what's going on.
Inside Man has just the right kind of humor for an action thriller. For lack of a better term, the humor fits, never seeming forced or unnatural and never trivializing the scene or deflating the tension. It is smart in its execution, and sometimes even smart in its purpose. There is more than a little social commentary mixed in, such as a scene with Owen and a young boy where Dalton says, "I need to talk to your father about this video game," as well as when a Sikh bank employee is mistaken for an Arab, and Frazier's quickly replies to diffuse the situation.
The mix of characters, too, forms a beautiful balance -- we never learn enough about them to make them "real people" (that's a good thing, because you do not go to see Inside Man expecting a human interest story), but we learn enough that they are not simply plot devices, either. Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster and Clive Owen have some smart, intense scenes, where the true action is the dialogue of manipulations and power plays, and they each pull off their parts impressively well.
Compliments to Spike Lee for his direction. Though some creative camera pans and spins could make some dizzy, I had no such problems, and those of normal constitution should be fine. I liked the look and the style of the film, and the subtlety with which so much of it was carried off. Spike Lee and his movies are not what I would normally associate with the word `classy,' but here, with the movie giving the barest hint of film noir, it most definitely applies.
Best of all, Inside Man had what gets me, as a writer, really excited about any story -- meaning. Mindless entertainment is all well and good, and some movies can't be any more than that, but Inside Man is not one of those movies. Hypocrisy and redemption figure heavily into the lives of the characters and their interactions, and the themes are well-executed, never heavy handed, and always remain an undercurrent to the plot itself.
If you want some mindless fun, keep moving -- there are no gunfights or exploding cars for you. But if you want intrigue, action, mystery, suspense, and don't mind a little active thought to get it, you're in good hands.
