Fitting together all the pieces of the puzzle that is director Spike Lee's Inside Man demands as much attention from the audience as was given it by the man who has planned "the perfect bank robbery" that is at the heart of the film.
Inside Man, in which 50 bank customers and employees are held hostage for hours and hours by the robbers, is one of those puzzlement films. Nothing turns out to be quite what it seemed or what one had expected from the start. Surprise is the name of this game in first-time writer Russell Gewirtz's complex, rambling, multi-character script. Yet although Lee and Gewirtz seem to be building, building, building to some startling, bang-up finish, at the end you might find yourself asking "Is that all there is?" My movie-going companion put it succinctly as the credits began rolling when she said, "I felt as if I was held hostage."
Yes, Inside Man is too long at a bit over two hours. But the "let-me-outta-here" feeling it creates is the result not so much of its seat-challenging running time, but the fact that its many characters are either anonymous or unlikable. In a movie full of surprises, the biggest may be that it has surprisingly little tension for a movie about bank robbers holding hostages. The 50 hostages are, for the most part, merely props in the scheme of the mysterious Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), who hatched the plan for the bank takeover and then doesn't seem to know how to end it . . . until everyone realizes that the bug-in-a-bottle situation, with the cops swarming around the outside of the bank building in Lower Manhattan while the robbers and hostages are bottled up inside, is just one more facet of his plan.
The plan soon expands to include a safe deposit box in the bank's vault that the ancient head of the bank, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), does not want opened; a fabulous diamond ring; Nazis; a ream of 60-year-old official-looking papers with swastika stamps; and a speech by the former president of Albania.
Denzel Washington, who once was Lee's Malcolm X, plays smooth-operator police Detective Keith Frazier, who has been assigned to the case. Frazier is still trying to prove himself worthy after some recent corruption scandal that's only hinted at. A subplot has him trying to schmooze his way into the good graces of his girlfriend.
Jodie Foster turns up in the strange role of a woman who seems to be a professional facilitator, smoothing the way for high-powered people who have been caught in sticky situations. In this situation, she has been hired by Case to negotiate with the robbers over that safe deposit box. In a bizarre nighttime scene, she's allowed into the darkened bank to discuss options with Dalton, the robbery mastermind.
Foster breezily plays the mysterious Madeline White as self-assured and with quick answers to all the problems. She wants to seem in control. But who is she? What is she? She seems to hold a link to the film's key puzzle, but then maybe not. Inside Man toys as much with the audience as with its characters. But with no character one can identify with, the whole becomes more of a mind game than an engrossing thriller.
Lee plays his familiar movie tricks here, which actually pull us out of the story, such as a sequence in which Frazier, having come to some earthshaking conclusion, is seen "running" toward the bank building. But he's not really running. He's standing squarely still in medium close-up as the background moves away, making it seem as if he's floating toward the bank while panicky cops create chaos around him.
There are odd sequences, too, that turn out to be Frazier's fantasies, though that's never clearly stated. He and his partner are seen in a harshly lit room interrogating some of the hostages who've been released from the bank. But except for one elderly man, it turns out in later scenes that none of them had been released! There are several of these what-if moments in the film, adding to the confusion.
Often, Inside Man seems too clever for its own good.
mjanuson@projo.com / (401) 277-7276
**1/2
Inside Man
Starring: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Rated: R, contains violence, profanity.
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