Spike Lee’s Inside Man opens with Dalton Russell in a small, dim cell, proclaiming he has committed the perfect bank robbery. What follows is a heist film that keeps its real subject hidden until the last act, and that patience is the whole point.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Dalton Russell and the Coverall Gang
Clive Owen plays Dalton Russell, the ringleader who seizes a Manhattan bank with masked robbers in painter coveralls. They use variants of the name “Steve” as aliases, split the hostages into groups, and force them into identical masks and coveralls. The robbers rotate hostages between rooms and slip themselves into the groups. They also take turns tearing down and rebuilding a fake wall in a storage room.
Denzel Washington as Keith Frazier
Denzel Washington is Detective Keith Frazier, the NYPD negotiator with a scandal attached to his name and a hunger for Detective First Grade. He and Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) run the negotiation outside. Russell demands food. The police send pizzas with listening devices hidden in the boxes.
The bugs pick up someone speaking Albanian, first mistaken for Russian. It turns out to be propaganda recordings of the late Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. The robbers anticipated the attempted surveillance.
Jodie Foster and the Fixer
Christopher Plummer is Arthur Case, the bank’s founder and chairman. When he learns of the holdup, he hires Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a Manhattan fixer, to protect one safe deposit box. White uses her influence with the Mayor of New York to get introduced to Frazier, and Russell agrees to let her inside so they can talk privately.
Russell breaks into a safe deposit box and finds documents from Nazi Germany. He implies Case started his bank with money he received for collaborating with the Nazis, and that many Jews died in World War II as a result.
Washington’s fourth collaboration with Lee gives the director his most expensive film, shot on location in New York City from June to August 2005 on a $45–60 million budget. Owen nearly turned the part down over the disguise.
To play whole scenes where you’re masked, you’ve got on sunglasses and you’re wearing a hood is very weird
What the Mask Costs
That worry is fair, and the film addresses it by revising the script to include scenes where Owen’s face could be shown. The mask still does real work. It makes Russell a voice and a plan rather than a face, which suits a movie about a man who has already won before the cops arrive.
The Safe Deposit Box
The Nazi documents are the film’s sharpest move. The heist is not the crime under examination; the bank’s founding is. Lee stages the standoff as procedure — pizzas, bugs, rotating hostages — then lets a fixer and a chairman’s secret turn it into something uglier.
The Verdict on Inside Man
Inside Man is a 2006 crime thriller written by Russell Gewirtz and built like a magic trick, and it mostly earns the reveal. The Albanian recordings and the fake wall are planted early and land well. Foster’s fixer is the weakest thread, a character who exists to open a door the plot needs opened.
The film runs 129 minutes and carries a tagline that promises you can’t judge a crime by its cover. That is exactly the argument it makes about Arthur Case, and it lands. Inside Man is Lee working in a commercial register without losing his eye for who actually holds the power in a room.
7.6/10 (Metacritic 76/100).
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