It's not certain who's walking away with the best deal at the end of "Inside Man," but it isn't the audience. It's a winning movie for much of its run time, but a few late-season revelations move it from slick crime thriller to muddied crime puzzler.
Spike Lee's zig-zagging take on bank robbery movies, everyone's out for something. Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team of baddies want something inside a Manhattan bank and lock themselves and 50 hostages inside to get it. NYPD detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) wants to defuse the hostage situation so he can burnish his tarnished professional reputation. Mysterious power broker Madeline White (Jodie Foster) wants to make sure neither one of them (or anyone else, for that matter) sees what's inside safety deposit box 392.
The actual robbery and subsequent barricading of the bank takes place in the first 10 minutes. What follows is Russell, Frazier and White trying to outfox the others to get to his or her mutually exclusive goal. This is Lee's twist on the cliché bank robbery premise — there is relatively little discussion of money or planning to get it. There are no lasers, heat sensors or elaborate safes to crack. Essentially, this is a battle of wills with a bank robbery as a backdrop.
Putting such stock in characters and almost completely abandoning the spiffy tactics that made heist scenes in films like "The Thomas Crown Affair" interesting is a risky venture, but Washington, Foster and Owen don't let Lee down.
Washington's character is deskbound with the check-cashing schemes and other boring cases, the only ones to come his way after previous misconduct. The robbery falls into his lap as chance at redemption; he's determined to take advantage of it. As the bank chairman's hired gun, Jodie Foster all but hisses as the cagey, vaguely threatening White, whose interest in the situation is cleverly left incompletely explained. Russell is the latest in a series of bad guys Owen has played in recent years, and his decision to deliver his lines in a wearying monotone with a stoic expression is one of the movie's few drawbacks. It can be forgiven, though, since he spends much of his time behind a mask.
Lee elevates his movie from a simplistic cops-and-robbers groundwork and should be complimented for that, but he overworks the triangle of at-odds players and becomes dangerously confident in the plot's twists towards the end of the film. Most of Lee's previous films have had racial messages and he can't resist inserting an unnecessary few here and there in this offering as well. For example, the police have removed a Sikh hostage's turban for security reasons, prompting a rant about how he's not an Arab, didn't blow anything up, always gets "randomly selected" for searching at the airport and doesn't deserve this. It's a gratingly incongruous monologue and has no place in a movie as sleek as "Inside Man."
It's good that Lee trusted his audience enough to let them follow an ever-shifting chain of alliances and power, but he needs to take a few lessons from Christopher Nolan of "Memento" fame before he can truly deliver a many-pieced puzzle.
Grade: BC