Why would a highly political director such as Spike Lee want to make a heist movie like this? Presumably it was to make a bigger profit than he has managed with his recent efforts.
But at least it is fair entertainment for the most part, coming to grief only in a discursive and unsatisfactory final half-hour.
Clive Owen appears as a brilliant criminal, Dalton, who gathers a group to hold up a Manhattan bank. They end up keeping the staff and customers hostage while a newly promoted detective, Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), once arraigned for corruption, attempts to deal with the resultant furore outside.
This is not, however, another Dog Day Afternoon, since nothing appears to have been stolen.
A great game of double bluff is being played both inside the bank and out. It has something to do with the filthy rich chairman of the bank (Christopher Plummer), a dispenser of much charity after making his money as a wartime Nazi collaborator.
Jodie Foster plays a mysterious New York power broker, Chiwetel Ejiofor takes the role of Frazier's partner and Willem Dafoe is Darius, the displaced police captain.
The film suggests that Dalton is a puppet-master who knows all the answers and that the detective is up to his knees in trouble as he works out the series of puzzles presented to him.
It is well acted, decently scripted and shot, and directed with some skill. Occasionally Lee even manages to get in a bit of his usual spikiness.
But in the end the plot begins to wear very thin and become increasingly illogical. You ask yourself, for instance, what Jodie Foster's character is doing in the film at all, and would detective Frazier be quite so bright yet still a badly paid policeman? Answers come there none.
Inside Man
Cert: 15
