Inside Man (Widescreen Edition)

Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) Review

Inside Man is a Spike Lee directed "Joint" starring academy award winners Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster as well as academy award nominee Christopher Plummer.

This is a story of a successful bankrobbery by a wiley criminal (Clive Owen) and a New York Police negotiator, Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington). The robbers are always one move ahead of the Police Department and keep control of the situation. Not only have they taken over the entire bank, they have about 30 hostages to bargain with. It is a tense situation, and the robbers have the power. During the negotiations the bank chair (Christopher Plummer) brings in Madeline White (Jodie Foster), a tough, cold, yet pleasant power broker. He needs her discretion to get something out of his safety deposit box to save his reputation. She has connections with the Mayor and asks him for access. He owes her a favor so she is allowed to meet with the robbers in person to present a "deal". After she leaves, Detective Frazier also talks to the head of the heist and threatens him. Before Frazier leaves the robber says "I will walk out of here".

As Detective Frazier continues negotiations there are flashbacks of hostage interviews (so we know they are saved at the end) and witty scenes where the robbers are ordering pizza for hungry hostages.

Overall the movie is an energetic, witty, enjoyable thriller that weaves throughout Spike Lee's familiar touching on race, power and class issues.

Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) Feature

INSIDE MAN

Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) Overview

Academy Award winner Denzel Washington, Academy Award nominee Clive Owen and Academy Award winner Jodie Foster star in this intense and explosive crime thriller. The perfect bank robbery quickly spirals into an unstable and deadly game of cat-and-mouse between a criminal mastermind (Owen), a determined detective (Washington), and a power broker with a hidden agenda (Foster). As the minutes tick by and the situation becomes increasingly tense, one wrong move could mean disaster for any one of them. From acclaimed director Spike Lee comes the edge-of-your-seat, action-packed thriller that The Wall Street Journal calls "a heist film that’s right on the money."

Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) Specifications

Spike Lee scored his biggest hit to date with Inside Man, an unconventional thriller with fascinating details in the margins of its convoluted plot. The screenplay (by first-timer Russell Gerwitz) could've used a few more rewrites; it moves at a brisk pace but in hindsight a lot of it doesn't make sense. That makes Inside Man more fun to watch than to think about afterwards (when you discover plot holes big enough to drive a truck through), but it's curiously involving, especially as NYPD Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) struggles to outsmart a high-stakes bank robber (Clive Owen) who, along with a well-trained crew of accomplices, has seized control of a Wall Street bank, turning what initially looks like a hostage crisis into a personal crusade to expose some mysterious evil secrets. As you might expect from the director of Do the Right Thing, Lee seizes several satisfying opportunities to examine post-9/11 issues of racial prejudice and domestic terrorism, and the mysterious "problem solver" Madeline White (Jodie Foster), as eerily sinister as she is vaguely defined, is worthy of her own movie. With the benefit of his most stellar cast to date (including Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe and Chiwetel Ejiofor), Lee seems more interested in character details than well-crafted suspense, but that doesn't stop Inside Man from being engrossing, subtly amusing, and quirky enough to qualify as a welcomed break from the formulaic thrillers that are Hollywood's bread and butter.--Jeff Shannon