Sorry for the repeated lies about posting this review. This movie is on Universal's 2006 release slate, and it seems like it's Spike Lee's attempt at a mega-mainstream film.
So, without more bullshit, here's my review of
INSIDE MAN...a
spike lee joint.
So there I was… surrounded by major players in the industry…
Brian Grazer…producer extraordinaire…
Opie Cunningham…still with half a tear in his eye because I hadn't seen
Cinderella Man yet…and Spike Lee, complete with white camo’d NY hat. If only Denzel had been there, I could’ve said, “And guess what! Denzel was there!”. But he wasn’t.
Anyway, we were gathered into the theatre to see Universal’s newest Spike Lee Joint “Inside Man”, starring
Clive Owen,
Denzel Washington,
Jodie Foster,
Willem Dafoe,
Christopher Plummer and the bad guy from
Serenity (read:
Chiwetel Ejiofor for the uninformed).
I’d like to start the review by saying that I’m not a huge fan of Spike Lee’s films. I liked
Do The Right Thing and
The 25th Hour.
Summer of Sam and
Bamboozled were terrible, and the rest were mediocre at best. And yeah, I get his style, and I understand what he thinks he’s doing, but I’ve also seen him speak in a university setting where he told students that “writing and poetry is not art”. So I don’t take much of what he does as “art” either.
The movie was surprisingly good and surprisingly bad at the same time. It’s not often that a subplot in a film, which easily makes up about 40% of the movie, is so poorly scripted that I shudder when I think about the writer cracking his knuckles in glee as he typed it out.
The film starts with Clive Owen, talking directly into the camera, setting the scene for us with a journalistic five W’s & an H. He tells us that he has planned the perfect bank robbery, and then the film is the “how”.
Clive Owen and his gang rob a bank in New York, and they have hostages. Denzel and Chiwetel are the detectives assigned to the case. Denzel has baggage. Willem Dafoe is the cop in charge at the site.
The film turns into
Phone Booth fairly quickly as nearly all of the action takes place either in the bank or in the police bus outside.
Christopher Plummer is the head of the board of directors of the bank. There’s something in the bank that he doesn’t want anyone to find. He hires the woefully miscast Jodie Foster to stop the bank robbers from getting it. Hilarity ensues. Or, at least, this poorly executed subplot.
The cops are outside. The bad guys are inside. The subplot of Foster & Plummer are kind of outside, too.
Do the bad guys get away? Does Denzel make a big speech? Are all the cops racist? I won’t tell you. Well… OK…. I’ll tell you the last one… OF COURSE THE COPS ARE RACIST! IT’S A SPIKE LEE “JOINT”!
So those are the basics of the film. It’s a caper movie with Spike’s often-too-overt social commentary about race relations between cops and New Yorkers as a side note.
Clive Owen OWNS this movie. He’s so much better than everybody else on screen that it’s almost painful to watch. Now, that’s hard for me to say, because I like all of the other actors, especially Denzel, but it’s true. He steals this film and walks right out the front door.
Now, as for the bad stuff I’ve eluded to…the subplot is just terrible. The “idea” of the subplot is perfectly reasonable, but, honestly, I’ve never seen Jodie Foster so miscast in all of my days wondering if Jodie Foster was ever going to be correctly cast. She’s always OK, but this part of the story was severely under-written, and she wouldn’t have been in my top 10 choices to play the role of “hard-edged no-nonsense conniving bad ass who gets things done”. Never.
The cops are not only stereotypically racist, but at times, it’s almost played for laughs in an otherwise dramatic suspense film. Some of the things people said were offensive, not because they were being offensive to a race, but because it was offensive for the writer and Spike to piss all over the audience’s intelligence. Take the five-minute diatribe about a “turban” for my example when you see the movie. It gets the point across in the first two sentences, but then just continues and continues and continues. We get it. Cops don’t like civilians. Black people don’t like white people. White people don’t like anybody. Thanks, Spike. We know how you feel. But it’s almost like the movie was made and Spike decided no one would know it was a Spike Lee Joint without some type of racial comment, so they went back and added in some race stuff just to ensure it’s place in his “Ain’t No Racist Like A Spike Lee Racist” DVD box set.
The film starts with a great song by somebody I don’t know in the beginning, and since there weren’t credits, I couldn’t tell you after either. Terrance Blanchard did the score, and it’s loud. Overly dramatic. Very 80’s television cop drama. I heard a lot of people say afterward how much they liked the music, so I’m probably once again in the minority, but I thought it was laughable at (several) times.
So yeah… I liked the overall movie. It was a valiant departure, for the most part, from other Spike Lee Joints, but he still hasn’t figured out how to craft a solid story from top to bottom. He always tries to do too much and ends up convoluting a rather intriguing story.
I have no idea when this film is supposed to hit the streets, but they’re still working on parts of it, and some of it wasn’t color corrected yet, so I imagine it will be a while. I just hope Clive has plenty of sandwiches while he’s “Inside”. Get it? GET IT?!?
-Constable Kreegal
Big Boss of the Sheep
