Straddling what in theory ought to be a very thick line between the glossily conventional and the bizarrely eccentric, Inside Man, the latest Spike Lee joint, finds its director in an atypically playful, antic mood. Indeed, for all this New York heist movie's pointed Sidney Lumet name-checking—the robber sarcastically calls the cop Serpico; the cop responds to the robber's demand for a plane with "Come on, you saw Dog Day Afternoon"—what it most resembles is a feature-length version of that recent experiment in which a clever editor cut a mock trailer for Kubrick's The Shining that somehow made it look like heartwarming treacle. On paper, Inside Man couldn't be more lugubrious: self-righteous thief; racial discord a go go; dark secrets that, if revealed, could find the narrative's true bad guy facing a particularly nasty tribunal. And yet the tone, after a tense opening siege at the Manhattan Trust Bank, quickly becomes waggish and discursive. The result is a singular genre effort, oddly weightless yet memorably flavorful.
Usually, in a movie like this, it's the criminal who gets the lion's share of the personality and the good lines, mischief being inherently more compelling than nobility. Poor Clive Owen ought to sue for breach of contract. As Dalton Russell, the blandly stoic leader of a masked, hooded gang of four, he has nothing to offer apart from his true motivation for the robbery, which pretty clearly has nothing to do with the stacks of cash piled in the bank's vault. Meanwhile, Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), who by all rights should be saddled with comparatively dull procedural minutiae, spends much of the film amiably hassling everyone from colleagues to released hostages—one of the victims, asking for a glass of water, quickly comes to regret having used the phrase "my throat is parched"—and Jodie Foster, cast wildly against type as a cold, scheming professional angle-shooter of some kind, takes obvious relish in behaving like, as one character candidly puts it, "a magnificent c--t."
Not for nothing, either, is Foster's character named Ms. White. For one thing, the information she's been hired by Manhattan Trust honcho Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) to protect—specifically, the contents of one of his bank's safety deposit boxes—purportedly establishes a link between the Case fortune and genocide. (Why Case would have kept such incriminating evidence in the first place is never satisfactorily explained.) But even the film's most incidental details are suffused with a consciousness of race rarely seen in a big-budget studio. How much of this mildly incendiary material was in the screenplay, written by first-timer Russell Gewirtz, and how much was shoehorned in by Lee, I can't say. Ultimately, though, Inside Man seems less interested in Case's ancient war crimes than in the related, very contemporary spectacle of a Sikh hostage having his turban forcibly removed by the NYPD, or in Frazier's smirking pride in not knowing the difference between Algeria and Albania.
Amazingly, none of this comes across as strident or didactic. Lee, who's been known to make his points with a pile driver, here employs the lightest, most glancing of touches, letting his anger surface quietly and cumulatively from a wellspring of dry humor. While he doesn't achieve anything remotely close to the raw power of 25th Hour—the first Hollywood feature gutsy enough to acknowledge that 9/11 had happened, and by far the most underrated American film of the past five or 10 years—he does manage to create something vital and distinctive from an otherwise formulaic and forgettable bit of fluff-with-pretensions. As conceived by Gewirtz, much of Inside Man's suspense derives from the question of how Dalton Russell and his cohorts are going to escape the bank with whatever their intended loot may be. "When I'm ready, I'm going to walk right out the front door," Russell tells Frazier. And he does. The solution is fairly ingenious, and a typical movie would have concluded on this Keyser Soze-style revelation, urging us to bask in the screenwriter's cleverness. Inside Man ends on a slow, lingering fadeout, as Frazier's girlfriend, a character we've barely seen, dangles his straw hat on one foot while she waits for him to get undressed and come to bed. It's a gorgeously poetic touch, and Spike Lee all the way.