Movie Review: Inside Man (2006)

This is so depressing that I debated as to whether to even bother to review this flick. Spike Lee had all the tools at his disposition to make a killer bank heist movie and it ended up more like leftover Pepsi that has been sitting in a refrigerator for a week.

The movie starts out so sublimely only to fizzle after the opening act. Dalton Russell, the bank robber extraordinaire, opens the movie by breaking the fourth wall and talking to the audience.

“My name is Dalton Russell. Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself.”

We then see him walk into the bank dressed as a painter and he begins setting up the bank by blinding the cameras with infra-red portable flashlights. Sounds cool so far, but the fun ends there. You keep expecting the situation to escalate at one point and then it doesn’t. It’s not a snorer, but it’s akin to being teased for two hours and not getting the happy.

THE GOOD

• Superb cast; Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Clive Owen and Willem Dafoe.
• The old-school cinematography. The minimal lighting and realism of the environments is fantastic. The offices look like real offices that have been used by the same person for years. Nothing looks like props.
• The setting. An old bank in the middle of a part of town being rebuilt just added to the realism.
• The Scramble. When the police get wind of the heist and scramble to get there, that was impressive.

THE BAD

• The soundtrack. It’s a good soundtrack; it’s just very badly used. The military march when the only thing happening is an empty bus parking adds drama to nothing. I expect a swat team to walk out.
• The Script. Like the soundtrack, it’s good, but it just meanders around and goes nowhere.
• The Characters. Everybody in here is so calm and bland that nothing ever happens. You can’t cast a powerhouse like Dafoe and have him doing nothing.
• The Plot. Or Plots. The movie keeps skipping from plot to plot with no apparent reason. This builds up to the end where you expect the story to unravel so you can better understand it. But it doesn’t. It just ends.
• Since when does a born and bred New Yorker dress like he's in the Bayou?

THE UGLY

• The Actors. To begin with, who ever said Denzel was a great actor needs to notice that he always plays the same character over and over again, and he’s not surprisingly good and just can’t deliver the jokes his characters spits out with any timing.
• The Actors part II. You have character actors like Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer and Willem Dafoe and you have them sitting around uttering a few witty words and that’s it? If you have C4, don’t use the little grenades.
• The Story. There isn’t much of one here. We have bank robbers, on-the-take cops, a banker with a skeleton in his closet, and an ethically unsound broker with connections. There’s no tension, no complex meshing of all the stories, there’s nothing. They just happen to be there. Everybody in there is crooked and in the end they get what they want. Boring.
• The Cadence. It’s a bank robbery movie, so there, somewhere, should be some intensity, some heart-pounding "will he or won't he do it?" moments. Nope. All the characters are so laid back that there is very little interaction between them. They talk like they are talking about their day over a cup of coffee.

Spike Lee had everything needed to make his own Dog Day Afternoon but he chose to make a bad made-for-TV movie. It gets a 2 outta 5.

Article Author: David Desjardins

Dave works in the IT industry despite his better judgment. He’s an artist at heart with a critical mind. He enjoys photography more than he could ever express. Dave feels a need to tweak his brain with copious amounts of taurine to stay sharp while absorbing all kinds of media on any medium. …

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