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Inside Man Our rating: Rate this movie   Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for language and some violent images) Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery Theater release: March 24, 2006 by Universal Directed by: Spike Lee Runtime: 2 hours 9 minutes Cast: Denzel Washington (Detective Keith Frazier), Clive Owen (Dalton Russell ), Jodie Foster (Madeline White), Christopher Plummer (Arthur Case), Willem Dafoe (Capt. John Darius), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Detective Bill Mitchell) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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.

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