|
Inside Man April 9, 2006 |
||
|
Dalton Russell is a direct and straightforward breed of bank robber, the kind of guy you don’t want to hide things from, because he’ll know, and you’ll pay dearly for the deception. Russell is the antagonist of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man”, a noteworthy heist saga filled with A-list stars and a solid B-movie script, and in one early scene he gets right to the point, before beating a man silly for concealing a cell phone – “My friends and I are making a very large withdrawal from this bank, anybody that gets in the way gets a bullet in the brain.” In a later scene we see that he isn’t kidding, lending a terrific sense of danger to his mission, to hijack the Wall Street branch of the Manhattan Trust Bank, dress everybody inside like painters, as to fake out the cameras and detectives surrounding the area, and make off with a king’s ransom in loot that will set him up for the rest of his life, preferably on a tropical island, “sucking down pina coladas in a hot tub with six girls named Amber and Tiffany.” He has planned the perfect robbery, he tells us in an opening monologue, simply because he can, because as a genius with ice in his veins, he gets off on outsmarting the system, and we see that the plan is pretty flawless, because even when the cops do show up, as is inevitable in a heist standoff movie, it’s Dalton that takes the upper hand, constantly playing mind games with his adversaries in a mental game of cat-and-mouse designed to outsmart the detectives, lead to his escape, and implicate everybody and anybody who was inside the bank as a potential robber. “Inside Man” stars Clive Owen as the bank robber, Denzel Washington as Keith Frazier, the chief detective trying to get inside Russell’s twisted logic, and Jodie Foster, thrown in for good measure as a high powered broker who specializes in keeping secrets secret for her rich clients, in this case, the bank’s owner, who wishes to keep private a rather dirty piece of paper hidden away in the bank vault that could be embarrassing in the hands of a man like Dalton Russell. The plot is out of “Dog Day Afternoon”, a film that Frazier actually cites during his one face to face encounter with Russell, and is conceived not particularly to be a thrilling action film, though the initial robbery staging is a nice piece of tricky robbery filmmaking, but as a setup to play these individual characters off of each other, each one with an agenda entirely dependent on the others specific actions. It’s like watching a chess match, played out by masterminds in a battlefield that is at once more threatening than a Sunday afternoon bench match in Central Park, and more substantially involving than your typical hands-in-the-air lone gunman bank job you see on the evening news. You can consider the film to be an exercise in the existential ethics of gamesmanship, where the stakes are slightly higher than what seems to be on the table, and the endgame lies within the psychological realms of the loser’s subconscious, where the winner gains satisfaction by imagining that very space, and how he was able to carefully orchestrate its present state of non-enlightenment. As Russell pulls his tricks on Washington’s detective Frazier, and Foster’s secretive power broker works her way into the bank to see if her client’s dirty little secret has been exposed to the robbers, Spike Lee works his own spell on the audience, staging post-robbery interviews with the hostages, cut into the narrative, to suggest that maybe Russell’s plan comes off, and that Frazier has bitten off more than he can chew with this case of illusions. The genius of the plan, and Lee’s larger scheme, is to undercut the movie plot with some thinly veiled social criticism, suggesting that in a melting pot like New York City, everybody is essentially the same, good or bad, when covered in face masks and painters uniforms, but when the masks come off, certain people, because of appearances, and bias, would appear to be more desirable suspects than others. “Inside Man” may be a heist film about cops and robbers, but don’t think Lee, the man who, at the height of his powers, made the greatest racial tension film in modern American cinema with “Do the Right Thing”, is beyond peppering it with some form of social commentary on his favorite city (and by association, the country as a whole), and the state of post 9/11 tensions and fear we live in, because he isn’t, and though the film may be the most mainstream of his career, he’s still smart enough to know when a nominal heist film needs a shot of ethics and criticism to raise it beyond mere thriller, to justifiably intelligent drama. With a bank robber as savvy as Russell, a detective as wily as Frazier, a director as socially conscious as Lee, and a setting as racially diverse as a New York City bank, where a teller can be a Sikh, a guard can be an African-American, a construction worker outside can be an Albanian, and customers inside can range from a yappy Italian-American bombshell, to an Asian college student minding his business with his Ipod, and a little boy content with playing violent shoot-em-up games on his PSP while his dad pays off his mortgage, “Inside Man” is thankfully more than just an escapist robbery film, it’s genuinely crafty, and an entirely diverse study in morality, procedure, and one-upmanship. It may not be “Do the Right Thing” or “Malcolm X”, but Spike Lee still knows what he’s doing, and that usually spells good news for the smart moviegoer. “Inside Man” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
|