REVIEWED - INSIDE MAN: SO, at a time when even the cuddliest directors are making political pictures, Spike Lee, the Brecht of Brooklyn, decides to deliver a rare genre entertainment. How typically perverse of him.
Inside Man, like The Taking of Pelham 123 and The Thomas Crown Affair, would surely feel content to be identified as a heist movie. We begin with Clive Owen, apparently in prison, staring at the camera and promising to tell us how he found himself so confined. He is, it transpires, the leader of a gang of hoodlums, who, posing as painters, break into a bank, padlock the doors and wait for the police to arrive. His principal antagonist, played with wry intelligence by Denzel Washington, is a detective hoping to distract attention from a disciplinary investigation by negotiating a happy conclusion to the siege.
Elsewhere, coachloads of famous actors paddle about, fleshing out various cleanly drawn roles. Willem Dafoe is the captain of the police special-services unit. Jodie Foster is a sinister society hostess, an eminence grise of the Upper East Side. Christopher Plummer, though nominally the bank's owner, is, as usual these days, the Military-Industrial Complex.
Lee and his screenwriter do manage to sneak some political observations into the picture. The police officers are unnecessarily brutal and insensitive towards an Arab suspect, who turns out to be one of the hostages. When Owen and his gang force all their captives to dress up in identical boiler suits, it is hard not to think of Guantanamo Bay.
But Inside Man works best - and, for the most part, it works brilliantly - as a tense, twisty thriller. Russell Gewirtz's debut script, full of clever misdirection and sharp, witty dialogue, is the sort of uncommon entity that can make a career. Among the highlights is a dryly amusing scene which finds Owen faintly shocked at the violent video game, a Grand Theft Auto clone, that a young hostage is playing on his portable console.
Lee, assisted by Terence Blanchard's fine, eclectic score, imposes a muted, silvery grey ambience over the picture. He allows the tension to develop slowly without ever hurrying his fine cast or resorting to pumped up rapid-cutting. The result is a sleek diversion that manages to be the director's most purely enjoyable film in a decade.
Oh, and if you manage to work out the significance of the title before the close then, you too, might have the makings of a criminal mastermind.
