Movie Review - Inside Man

Rotten Tomatoes - Inside Man

Eighty-Eight Percent? 7.4/10 on the average review? 86% of the respectable reviewers (sorry, Planet Sick-Boy, Spirituality and Practice, Film Freak Central, et al, but you do not have the cache of major papers and real industry publications like the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times or Roger Ebert. You just don't). I guess reviews aren't what they used to be. Maybe with future ad dollars tied to current reviews, there is pressure for the critics to be less critical. Maybe it's a post 9-11 phenomena. Maybe the Bush administration has raised the bar for what it takes to merit an honest, critical review. At any rate, I, on the basis of Rotten Tomatoes (whose flaws I have discussed previously), went to see The Inside Man this past Saturday Evening. I enjoyed the film but was disappointed, particularly in light of some of the blurbs on the tomato site.

The movie is a heist thriller in which the heist makes pretty minimal sense. The robbers break into a bank, in broad daylight, and take a bunch of people captive. They take their cell phones, their keys and their clothes, replacing said clothes with jumpsuits and painters masks, identical to those worn by the heist artists. They then set about the profit portion of the game. They ignore the large bricks of cash, using them as stools. I think this is a decent move, because how are you gonna get all that money out. Their target is a safe deposit box. Just one. It contains some blackmail material and some diamonds. The box belongs to the bank's founder and inexplicably contains documents proving that his fortune was made in war profiteering during WWII, at the expense of Jews. As strategies go, I think this is kind of weak. There are at least 300 safe deposit boxes. If you're set up to take one, you can probably examine a couple of others. You don't know what's in em, but it's likely as portable as the contents of the one you are looting. Possibly more valuable. Why not look? Especially since you are looking at something like 50 counts of kidnapping. I don't think you get an extra armed robbery charge for looting an extra box at the same bank, so why not go for it. The bank's insurance covers whatever you steal from the boxes. You might find more conflict diamonds. You might get better blackmail material. You might get that old heist standby, bearer bonds. Who knows? But not trying shows a lack of imagination and initiative by a set of bank robbers who have plenty of both. Dopey. Simply Dopey. Back to the stuff they actually do steal. It brings us our first major plot hole.

Major Plot Hole #1: Why would you keep this stuff around? Burn it, moron. Maybe he wanted to keep it to remind himself of what he'd done. You'd think he'd remember something like, "How I made my money." But nope, he keeps the documents around. While it was improbable that they would ever be found, much less stolen, from an unregistered safe deposit box in a bank that you own, why even take the chance. Something that is improbable, rather than impossible, is still possible, and will eventually happen over a long enough time span. Moron.

Denzel is called in as the number two police negotiator. He's got a corruption scandal hanging over his head and a chip on his shoulder. Has Denzel ever played a role where he didn't have a chip? Any rate, Denzel is pretty good. Even in the weird scene when he's heading to his face-to-face with the baddies. It looked like he was on a SegWay and stoned. The film has a few shots with weird movement that take you out of the film as you notice how weird they are. I think this is probably an NYU alum thing. Critics love this junk. Audiences know better. Werid shots that take you out of the picture because you are busy laughing at the shot are not good film making. When Denzel glides towards the camera and everyone else freezes and floats back and out of focus, a good portion of the audience I was watching with LAUGHED. Yes. LAUGHED. But Denzel is pretty solid, if a lousy negotiator. I took a number of courses on negotiation at the graduate level. We watched a number of negotiators at work with different styles and different levels of effectiveness. Denzel's character is the #2 negotiator for a reason. He's not very good. As a police negotiator, you have a pretty strong hand. You control the exterior environment. They control the smaller ground, the inside, but you even have control over the lights, the electric, the air and the food in their environment. They control the hostages, but you control pretty much everything else. And you have the bigger final sanction, full scale tactical assault. They can kill all the hostages, but they lose their bargaining power by doing that. You can order the breech, which will likely result in dead robbers, a definite loss in the negotiation. So, Denzel's character, while being a reasonably smart cop (we are reminded of this several times) is a crap negotiator. He doesn't use any of his resources to either stretch or contract time to any kind of advantage. I could go on, but I suspect that this isn't that interesting.

The third party in play here is Jodie Foster. She is some kind of political fixer/influence broker. It is never explained, except that our Nazi banker has no problem calling her a cunt to her face. I've known a few women I didn't like a lot, but use the C-word? Nope. And I'm pretty free and easy with the lingo, believing that using it is the key to robbing it of it's power. I met a comedian in LA who did a routine about women using the C-word the way black people use the N-word, to repossess it. At any rate, that's not what's going on here. It's more of Spike Lee's fixation on the worst and most surreal of language to make his ham handed points. I will elucidate later, because I want to talk about Jodie Foster here. Foster has her tentacles into everything. The Bin Ladens (not Osama, but one of the "good" cousins), the mayor, the big banker, even the NYPD. She's hired by the banker to secure his safe deposit box, the very item that is the sole target of the robbery. She pulls strings on the mayor to get in on the counter heist team and then manages to open an negotiation with the robbers. They blow her off, and that's pretty much her involvement until the end of the movie.

Any rate, the people eventually come streaming out of the bank, with the robbers indistinguishable from the captives, since they are all wearing the same outfit. Except they aren't.

Major Plot Hole #2: As all the bank people are laid out on the street and getting cuffed, I notice one chick is wearing some ugly white pumps. Then I notice that everyone has different kinds of shoes on and it makes it pretty easy to tell them apart while they lay there. Denzel was pretty much eye to boot with one of the robbers. Unless he changed his shoes, I think we find him right there. We put him in the interrogation booth and lean on him HARD. 50 counts of kidnapping and illegal imprisonment. Attempted armed robbery. Assault. If we get him on the kidnapping, his grandkids won't see the light of day. He could live to five hundred and never be free. We also believe at that time that we have a special circumstance homicide in there. That's the needle and the damage done in New York. Conspiracy to commit as well. We have a lot to lean on him with. He breaks. We have them all, including the ring leader who's hiding. But nope, we don't even look for the kind of details that good cops are supposed to look for.

The film is interrupted in places by Denzel and his partner working the witnesses in interrogation. He can't tell the robbers from the victims at all, despite what I figured. After the heist is over, we skip to the aftermath of the debriefs. Everyone checks everyone else, so we can't get em out like that. No major criminal records. Nothing else to work em out. They even show a series of charts. And, since nothing was stolen (the contents of the box were unregistered, so no harm no foul), there are no charges (except the 40+ kidnapping charges, but kidnapping is only an A-1 to B felony, like murder, no big deal. The lesser charge is either an E felony or an A misdemeanor. Since there was a minor involved, these are sex offender registry offenses).

Major Plot Hole #3: As part of my MBA, I studied networks and all the tools for diagramming them. We can put the information on who clears who into a spreadsheet and make a graphical representation of it, much like you might see on theyrule.net (you need flash 7 for this). You will get an interesting picture if it works how it should. You should get the bank employees clearing the other bank employees and some customers. You should get the customers clearing some employees and some customers. And you should get three or four people who are the only links to each other. Or link very lightly to the rest of the group who should be pretty tangled. Those people, who are they? They are probably your bank robbers, who entered masked and therefore wouldn't be recognized by anyone outside their own circle. Similarly, they had a description of one of the robbers as being a big breasted woman. There were two who fit the description. One was cleared by a bunch of people, because she was talking loudly on her cell phone. So, we KNOW the other big boobed girl is in the mix. Do we sweat her extra hard? Nope. I guess we're not that interested in actually catching the bad guys. This is a major plot hole because they did all the work except for the last little bit.

They then examine the bank records copiously, finding the unregistered safe deposit box. They have complete access to the bank's records and they focus on this small thing.

Major Plot Hole #4: Let's think what you could do if you had complete access to a bank's records and 45 suspects, 40 or so of whom are innocent. I dunno about you, but I'm gonna remove anyone who works for the bank from my pool. Why? Because we are looking for the people who didn't belong in the bank. Is there an inside man? Probably. Will I miss him or her? On the first pass. But I get my outside people and I sweat them till the give me everything and I get the insider on the second round. Not hard. I bet I can do even better on eliminating employees. There must be some kind of work schedule, so I can tell which employees were supposed to be in the bank. That cuts maybe half of my suspect pool. Then, I look for accounts. If you are patronizing the bank on the morning of the robbery, you must have some business there and that takes some kind of account. Anyone who doesn't have an account gets a deeper look at. I probably have enough from that to secure wiretaps. I don't even need a warrant to follow them around for a week or two. With 40+ potential A-1 Felonies, clocking in with sentences of 15-to-life, I can't think that the DA wouldn't want this investigated to completion. This method of investigation is not mentioned by Denzel in his exhaustive but lazy list of things he's looked at. If I came up with it while watching the movie, you have to think that the cops would, too. Seems so obvious.

I don't want to blow the ending for you, but the head robbers escape from the bank is improbable and poorly planned. If you go see it, he would smell to high heaven, he's a week unshaven, he's wearing sunglasses inside, and he looks like he's slept for a week in a box. While he could pass for a homeless person, he looks a tad strange walking through the lobby of a major wall street bank. More than a tad out of place. I could make this a major plot hole, but I would have to spoil it to do so, and I don't want to do that.

The movie is punctuated with racist lingo and the typical Spike Lee Joint polemics about racism. I'm not black, so I dunno what I know about racism but it's all too upfront here. Lee's cops (the white ones) are racists. No, that's not right. They are probably all members of the Klan. And while I'm sure there are Klan Kops in New York City, I don't think they could ALL be Klan. I mean there are 35,000 cops in New York City. Assume 50% honkeys. That'd be the largest Klan convocation anywhere, ever. There probably aren't 17,000 Klansmen in all of Alabama. And besides, we know that racism is one of those in-the-dark kinds of things. If I'm a racist, I don't use the N-word to black people. I use it in the comfort of my own home with my own kind. I don't even come close to dropping it with a black person. In fact, I don't fly my racism around like a flag. It's not socially desirable, so it's a private thing. But every white person at the scene of the crime is a stone cold racist in Lee's vision of New York. And there, the vision doesn't ring true. It's cartoonish and it always takes away from the plot.

I want to make a comment about the soundtrack before I wrap. The film opens with some very interesting Bollywood Dance style Indian music. It closes with same, only with hip hop over the top. Both very interesting but having almost nothing to do with the story, the plot, the theme, the setting or really much of anything, other than the zeitgeist likes Bollywood Dance music right now. The rest of the movie is filled with a plodding orchestral score that serves to emphasize the length of the movie and the fact that there are stretches, and not small ones, where the movie is very static and not terribly ininteresting. I think I could trim ten or twenty minutes from this flick and make it a much better movie. Faster paced with less dead time. I think I could take ten minutes from it just by cutting goofy interstitials where nothing important is happening. Spike Lee is probably big enough now that no one says no to him (or are they afraid to be called racists who don't get it if they do). His best move would be to hire a very strong editor who could take his footage and make something totally coherent out of it. It won't happen. Those NYU guys (save Scorsese) are just like that I guess.

In summation, I think the comparisons to Dog Day Afternoon are more than a little overblown. They are also invited by the movie itself as it drops a reference in the second act to that film, naming it explicitly. But, while it's a decent heist movie, it doesn't reach that level. Or the level of Heist, The Score, The Good Thief, Reservoir Dogs, or Heat. Or even Collateral. Yet it is getting reviews as good or better than all of those save Heat. Maybe that's the soft cruelty of low expectations that the Republicans are always talking about. We don't expect Spike to make great movies, so when he makes a decent one, we think it's a new classic. For now, Spike is on my list with fellow Manhattanite Woody Allen as directors whose reviews I will discount entirely in making a purchase decision at the box office.

Bottom line: Decent movie, but not up to the hype. Not even close.