Eric here to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Spike Lee's Inside Man, which remains his biggest box office hit.
When this tightly-plotted bank heist movie was released a decade ago, it promised a heavenly trio of huge stars: Denzel Washington, two time Oscar winner; Clive Owen, fresh off his first nomination for Closer; and Jodie Foster, coming off two solo box office successes (Panic Room and Flightplan). A decade later, only Washington (the least interesting actor of that trio) still works with annual frequency in major pictures. He lends effortless dynamism and charisma in his usual everyman role. Unfortunately its been lazy sailing for him ever since with one major exception (Flight).
Watching Inside Man again, it’s the loss of both Owen and Foster as regular cinema fixtures that burns, which is ironic since the film demands little from them. [More...]
Owen spends a fair amount of the movie with his airplane-landing-strip lips smothered behind a mask, but he creates a full-on movie character to provide a proper foil to Washington. Why is Clive Owen no longer headlining major motion pictures? He’s that rare creature: a talented, trained actor who you also believe would give you the best sex of your life and then make a killer joke afterwards. TV’s gain remains cinema’s loss.
I misremembered Foster's role, believing she had had much more to do, but she’s actually only in a handful of scenes. She aces them doing that thing that Jodie Foster does better than anybody: allowing you to actually see her character thinking. She’s always one jump beyond everyone else, both as a character and an actor. She went on to one more hit (The Brave One) and since then her appearances have become infrequent, and her acting more mannered. She’s one of the greats, though, and the morsels dropped in Inside Man are enough to remind you that some director should be coaxing her into a "comeback" with a killer role.
The most interesting thing about the film ten years ago was that Spike Lee was doing a studio picture at all, his first unabashedly commercial film. It was a for-hire job for a director usually accustomed to building and directing personal films. The result still feels electrifying: on the whole, still today, it works better as a total film than many of his other movies (or should I say “joints”…you know what, let’s not). The world will always owe Lee for giving us his one masterpiece, Do The Right Thing, and he’s made a few other fine fims (Malcolm X, Clockers), but surely Lee is no longer held as one of our major filmmakers? Revisiting Inside Man can make you yearn for him to to take on another studio assignment.
Two elements of the film that have not aged well, not that they were pleasant at the time, are the sexism and homophobia. Lee was clever enough to emphasize the casual racism perpetrated by the NYPD. Officers across the board make gross generalizations about people based on their ethnicity and color, and Lee pointedly highlights the endemic nature of the problem and even some of the whys behind uglier thoughts and behaviors. But his sympathies do not extend further. The women in the film are either castrating bitches (Foster, who is actually called the c-word) or large-breasted objects. When the men make jokes about their “great tits” it’s not there as social commentary like the racial elements, but a simple joke for the audience to laugh at. Similarly, there’s a gay prison sex joke followed by Washington’s remark that maybe Owen’s character is into “that sort of thing”.
But, ultimately, Inside Man remains an incredibly enjoyable experience. It offers big movie-movie pleasures that more accomplished smaller films can’t quite deliver. Lee’s craftsmanlike approach has real verve and yields suspense. The three stars are all fun to watch, however little might be asked of them. Russell Gewirtz's splendid script keeps you guessing at its twists all over again, years later, and it all feels like a dandy “New York City film," Hollywood Division. Perhaps it's no classic, and a minor entry in the filmography of its major talents, but catch it in another ten years and I'll bet it's still worth two hours of your life.
Inside Man also has Chiwetel Ejiofor in an early role. Great things were ahead for him
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