People usually say that you need two things for a great heist film. You need a good plan without holes and a good bad guy to pull it off. Inside Man, directed by Spike Lee has both and adds a great cast and while it's worth seeing, it's not as great as it could have been.
The film starts right in with the heist. Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) goes into a bank dressed as a worker and them some others come in. They seal up the bank and take hostages. Immediately a cop on the street notices it and calls in it. Willem DaFoe is the police captain in charge on the scene, at least until Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) shows up. Frazier is being investigated for something but is being given this assignment to prove himself a good cop, he's also thinking about proposing to his girlfriend. In a odd side plot we find out that the bank's CEO Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) has some secret he'd like to keep and that details of it are in a safe deposit box in the branch that Russell has taken hostages. Case hires Madeline White (Jodie Foster) to make sure his secret stays secret. Ms. White seem to be a high-priced, well-connected fixer of problems, think Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction, but without the threat of violence.
So we have a great cast and the scheme is pretty good. Russell is an exacting person in control of the situation and Frazier is a well-meaning cop who's not underestimating him. Russell seems to have some depth as two scenes point out. One of his hostages is a young black child playing an ultra-violent PSP game. Russell asks about it and says he'll need to talk to the kid's father about this, clearly not approving of his parenting skills. Russell also gives Frazier advice about his girlfriend, saying that if they are in love, that's all that should be enough. These touches seem to suggest a rightous moral man, but yet he's robbing a bank. This seems like a setup for something more, but the story never goes there.
There are a few scenes with Mr. Case and Ms. White trying to manipulate things but not many, and their characters are not really developed (well his is more than hers). And DaFoe's captain must have had scenes cut because there's little reason for such a known actor to be in the role. So how is it that all these characters have small roles in a movie that's a little over two hours? It's a Spike Lee film so there are various slow motion camera pans with loud dramatic music playing over it. But part of the plot is that the bad guys don't seem to be in a rush and Frazier is trying to figure out why. But he doesn't seem to be in a rush either.
This leaves time for Spike Lee to add some racial undertones and lots of New York'isms. The cops bug the bank and hear some foreign language spoken. When they can't identify it they play it for the crowd of onlookers hoping one will recognize it. Of course someone does and it's much easier to bring down his ex-wife to do the translation than it is to go through official channels. There are a number of jabs against the police too. Only one really bothered me, when an office fires rubber bullets into a crowd when it was completely unnecessary. It's your typical Spike Lee, crowd out of control, needing to be calmed down scene and it didn't seem right. And if the CEO, mayer and police commissioner, all old white men, aren't obvious enough to show you who's in control, Ms White is there supposedly manipulating all the strings in the background to make it as obvious as possible.
It's also clearly set in a post 9/11 New York. If the posters on the walls in the background don't convince you, the scene with the Sikh complaining that a cop called him an Arab and that he's tired of always being the subject of a "random" search at the airport. When Denzel says "but you probably have an easy time getting a cab" I laughed with the Sikh character, but then cringed a bit.
When Lee shows the heist scenes they all work, and as I've said the plot is pretty good, though I was left wondering how Russell got all the info he needed to pull this off in the first place. When he shows the NY stuff it works pretty well too, but I'm not sure they work so well together. Certainly Dog Day Afternoon (which is mentioned in this film) and many other films prove this combination can be great, but I don't think Lee's style for these scenes blends well with a taunt capper. Inside Man is a good film, probably the best of the year so far (ok, that's not saying much), but much like last year's The Interpreter, this movie could have been great, and the fact that it wasn't, is a bit disappointing.
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