| Bilgi :Spike Lee's latest movie is perhaps his most
mainstream fare to date—the plot hinges on a bank heist with a
twist (what bank heist movie doesn't have a twist these days?)
that promises to leave the audience guessing till the end. In
reality, the only questions left hanging by the end of the
movie are the result of bank vault door-sized holes in said
plot. But, as in the movie itself, those bank vault doors
aren't all that important. They're only a diversion. The
interesting action is happening over to the side. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Clive Owen plays a bank robber
who pulls of a heist that isn't
quite what it
seems
 |
The plot, yes. Four bad guys, dressed like
painters and led by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), knock over
Manhattan Trust. They lock the bank doors, wield guns, and
take hostages—all of whom are forced to strip and put on
matching painter's coveralls and masks. An NYPD officer on
street patrol quickly figures out something's going down
inside the bank—a 357 pointed in his face by a masked gunman
did the trick—and the game is on. "Bad guys, here I come,"
says Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) as he and
partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) rush to the scene to
serve as hostage negotiators.
Meanwhile, a rich white man is getting very
uncomfortable in his posh digs at the news that one of his
bank branches is being robbed. And not just any bank
branch—the Manhattan Trust branch. It turns out that this
Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) has some incriminating
evidence of the World War II-colluding-with-Nazis variety
stored in a safe deposit box at that branch. Say it ain't
so, Captain von Trapp!
Denzel Washington as Detective
Keith Frazier and Chiwetel Ejiofor
as Detective Bill
Mitchell
|
Desperate to keep his history hidden, Case
calls in the formidable Madeline White (Jodie Foster). Who is
Madeline White? Good question. And I can't tell you, not
because I don't want to spoil anything for you, but because I
still don't know. Suffice it to say, she has the mayor of NYC
in her pocket and can pull strings when strings need to be
pulled—all for a nice fee of course. She makes her way to the
bank where the police are engaged in the elaborate work of
hostage negotiation—the strategic delivery of pizza up to this
point—to keep an eye on things.
With White's entry on the scene, three
agendas are in play. The first two are pretty straightforward:
Arthur Case's desire to keep the contents of his safe deposit
box a secret, and Detective Frazier's desire to wrap up this
case in orderly fashion given that he's under professional
scrutiny thanks to some missing money from a previous case.
What's not so clear is the third agenda: What is it that the
bank robbers really want? Because as time ticks by, it doesn't
appear to be the money. And there's the rub.
Inside Man is serviceable as a
Hollywood-style cops and robbers pic. It offers beautiful
people doing heroic and/or dastardly things, and throws in
some vaguely expected twists and turns. But the movie bristles
with life in the moments when the rub is just that—the rubbing
together of people from different races and classes, each
person bringing their own set of experiences and expectations
to the table that is New York City. This is one of Spike Lee's
joints after all, and Inside Man is at its most
interesting and entertaining when reflecting these tensions.
Jodie Foster as Madeline White,
a power broker who brings an agenda to the
negotiations
|
Perhaps to this end, Lee painstakingly
underlines the different ethnic groups at play and you get
dialogue like this when Frazier asks a hostage about his
name:
"Is that Albanian?"
"It's Armenian."
"What's the difference?"
When an unarmed hostage is released, an armed
cop shouts, "He's an Arab!" And you can hear the post-9/11
weariness in the man's voice when he replies "I'm a Sikh."
That piece of information doesn't keep the police from roughly
checking him for a bomb and taking off his turban, a sign of
religious devotion for Sikhs. The man's subsequent diatribe
against profiling is brought to an abrupt end when Frazier
points out that he probably doesn't have any problem getting a
cab.
Christopher Plummer as banking
mogul Arthur Case, who has some revealing secrets hidden
in the
bank vault
|
The humor laced throughout Inside Man
often throws the movie off-kilter—one moment the score and
lighting present a heavy-handed drama, the next moment the
audience is laughing out loud—but such levity buoys what could
have been overly earnest or, worse, boring. Instead, the wit
forges a connection between the audience and the characters,
and it keeps us engaged long after we might have otherwise
mentally checked out.
Washington exudes causal charm in this role,
and Ejiofor, a rising star from England, as his partner,
matches his gravitas. And despite being behind a mask for most
of the movie, Owen does an admirable job as the bad guy
playing a high stakes game of chess with Washington's
detective Frazier. All of the actors flesh out their roles
with a confidence that almost bluffs you into believing
everything in the plot makes perfect sense. It doesn't. So
ignore those gaping bank vault door-sized holes in the plot.
(Or better yet, enjoy that feeling of superiority, as you are
able to point out what doesn't add up.) |
