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Topic: Good Review: Inside Man (Read 626 times)

Rhune
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Good Review: Inside Man
« on: Mar 24^th, 2006, 6:55am »

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Inside Man
Spike Lee's latest a smarter-than-average thriller

By Daniel Fienberg
March 23 2006

The best Sidney Lumet movie in 25 years is now in theaters. Interestingly, that honor doesn't go to the film that Lumet actually directed (the somewhat disappointing "Find Me Guilty") but to the latest by Spike Lee. "Inside Man," featuring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster, has the surface gloss of a smart heist picture, but its lifeblood, as so often happens in Lee's better films, is the pulse of contemporary New York City and even contemporary America.

"Inside Man," scripted without a hint of fat by Russell Gewirtz, jumps into things quickly. A group of four masked robbers move into a busy Manhattan bank and take an assortment of hostages who, in trademark Lee style, reflect every imaginable face of Big Apple diversity. Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), battling a minor assortment of personal demons, gets called in to play negotiator to the lead thief (Clive Owen), who makes the usual demands, including a plane. Frazier soon begins to suspect that the robbery is about more than money. But what? Viewers get some hint as a wealthy bank trustee (Christopher Plummer) calls in a highly paid fixer (Jodie Foster) to use her connections to keep the contents of one particular safety deposit box secret.

The story unspools in a variety of surprising (but not actually shocking) directions, but the twists aren't really where "Inside Man" succeeds. While it's important that films of this genre get the heist mechanics down, but they're most satisfying when they get down to the basics -- charismatic actors playing smart people playing mindgames with each other. The tension in "The Inside Man" comes from watching Washington, Foster and Owen inhabit differently manipulative characters, each trying to guess the others' next move. It's a contrast of styles as Gewirtz and Lee orchestrate one scene after another to contrast Owen's steely resolve, Washington's trained swagger and Foster's venomous insinuation. This isn't a movie that lets viewers just sit back and coast on the actors' ample charm (this isn't "Ocean's Eleven," I mean), though the three stars are in top form. It's a chess game and audience members who aren't sure where the pieces are on the board may get lost.

The script specifically mentions both "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon," but Lee isn't postmodern in his approach to Lumet's gritty '70s classics. He just understands why they worked. The film comes out of a post 9/11 consciousness, an awareness that a city that was once a melting pot has also now become a petri dish for racial profiling and paranoia. People react differently now to the sight of a man with a gun or even to an innocent man wearing a turban. And Lee knows that in the wake of political scandals and prisoner abuse controversy, viewers respond differently to intimations of corporate duplicity and captive torture. The director, never particularly subtle, even makes what I took to be visual references to the pictures from Abu Ghraib. The best thing, though, is that while Lee has to get in his personal commentary, he never forgets that he's making a thriller.

The technical credits on the film are all outstanding. Working mostly hand-held, cinematographer Matthew Libatique manages both the claustrophobic interiors of the bank and the New York locations, while also delivering the flashy aesthetics we expect from a Spike Lee joint. With a dramatic structure that skips around in time, editor Barry Alexander Brown manages to disorient viewers in the right ways without sacrificing tension. The film just soars along things to a score by Terence Blanchard that has influences as varied as Middle Eastern music and themes and brassy American jazz.

"Inside Man" isn't a movie without flaws. You just have to accept that absence of backstories for most of the characters, acknowledging that any exposition about Foster or Owen's characters would have tripped up the film's pace. A series of false endings also blunt the impact. There are still ample pleasures to watching this kind of film done right and to seeing an erratic director like Lee do his part to make the material linger after lights go up.

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Colleen
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Re: Good Review: Inside Man
« Reply #1 on: Mar 25^th, 2006, 9:11am »

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Going to see this tonight, cant wait!

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Colleen
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Re: Good Review: Inside Man
« Reply #2 on: Mar 25^th, 2006, 1:55pm »

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Great Movie. This is a movie that I will buy for sure. It felt like I walked into the theatre and five minutes later I walked out. Time just flew by. It was a great twist. Go see it Wink

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Colleen
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Re: Good Review: Inside Man
« Reply #3 on: Apr 8^th, 2006, 9:49pm »

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Did anyone eles go see this movie?

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banzai
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Re: Good Review: Inside Man
« Reply #4 on: Oct 27^th, 2006, 10:08pm »

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Good movie. I saw it 4 times already. Grin

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Mavik
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Re: Good Review: Inside Man
« Reply #5 on: Nov 2^nd, 2006, 3:01pm »

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i saw it last night..great movie...Jodie Foster is the true star in it..in my opinion she gives in it one of the greatest performances in the last 10 years..unbeatable

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It's all been said and done before.

Isle_be_back
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Re: Good Review: Inside Man
« Reply #6 on: Nov 3^rd, 2006, 12:16am »

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Yeah. I saw it. The twist at the end? All I could say was...That was it? I wasted 2 hours of my life and this little "twist" at the end is supposed to make up for it? I just thought it was a long way to go for so little at the end.

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