Film of the Week: Inside Man

Inside Man is the peak example of getting an auteur director to do the kind of project often saved for journeymen. What could've, on paper, been a standard crime thriller is, in the hands of Spike Lee, turned into a clever, tense caper full of great performances and biting social commentary that is just a blast to watch. Another thing that makes Inside Man such an interesting watch is that it simply doesn't feel like a movie you make anymore. Mid-budgeted crime thrillers of this nature used to be a dime a dozen; now very rarely do they grace our silver screens. (Perhaps if more of you had seen Steve McQueen's excellent Widows, things would be different, but alas.) It's a film very much of its era, but rather than feel dated, it gives it a sense of being tied into its cultural moment that the best works of Spike Lee often do. NYPD officers shake down a Sikh witness, his protests falling on the unsympathetic ears of a diverse duo of detectives, while the film's true villain is none other than a bank founder trying to cover his ties to Nazi Germany. It's efforts at social commentary, rather than distracting, instead enhance the narrative, creating something angrier and more intriguing than the usual genre fare.

It helps, of course, that it's also a very entertaining watch. Lee's direction propels the film forward, with clever usage of cuts and shifts in perspective being deployed to leave the audience guessing without ever feeling lied to. A particular favorite is the film's interrogation scenes, narrative flash-forwards that swing from humorous to quietly revealing, sewing seeds of paranoia in the modern-day scene. It's incredibly confident in how it chooses to tell a story, even down to its usage of humor, which could've easily fallen flat but instead breaks the tension and makes the characters feel real and believable. Without spoiling, I'll confidently say this has one of the funniest needle drops of all time.

Another major point in Inside Man's favor? The absolutely stacked cast firing on all cylinders. Denzel Washington, one of our greatest leading men, plays Detective Frazier, a put-upon hostage negotiator, as a witty everyman who is just clever enough that his battle of wits with Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) never feels one-sided. Owen, in particular, is excellent, swinging from affable and witty to genuinely terrifying at the drop of a hat. One moment, he savagely beats a hostage for lying to him. The next? Quietly musing on the nature of violent videogames with a young boy unfortunate enough to be caught up in the robbery, a clever parallel is drawn between him and how the detectives similarly shift attitudes depending on the suspects they're interrogating.

In many ways, that idea, how clever people weaponize personality for their own ends, is the throughline of much of the film. From how the detectives switch from affable to harsh, to Dalton's willingness to dance between detached humor to seemingly casual cruelty, to Arthur Case's (Christopher Plummer) usage of charity to hide the bloodsoaked ways in which he acquired his wealth, Inside Man ponders the faces we wear to get the job done and how much, if any of it, is the real us. In this way, none of our characters are very different; all charismatic people who weaponize that charisma for their own means in a world where the lines of morality aren't quite so clear.