Inside Man (2006)

Inside Man (2006)

7/10

Starring

Denzel Washington

Clive Owen

Jodie Foster

Christopher Plummer

Willem Dafoe

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Directed by Spike Lee

Spike Lee was on the helms as director and the movie did not feel like a Spike Lee movie I know. This is an awesome movie with Denzel making the hostage negotiation thing look magnificent he was so good at it, you’d think it is what he does for a living.

I like the way the movie functions on many levels. Although the plot has a big gaping hole (or maybe my assumptions below are true) of how the criminal knew which bank and which safe deposit box to attack. Them knowing of the bad man’s crime is explained away in the film (I hope you did not miss that), but maybe that is the job of the inside man. He is to find the bank and the box. Maybe the inside man was in-reference of the way Clive Owen’s character Russell in the way he was in the ending and which bank and which box is left to us. Whichever it was, I guess the writer wants us to use our imagination to sort that out.

The movie starts with a beautiful musical score, then we meet Russell who is telling us of the bank robbery he is about to commit that is meant to be a big splash. He and his team raid a bank and put all the hostages in the same cloth as them as they continue their robbery.

Detective Keith (Denzel) is called to handle the hostage negotiation. He starts to suspect that there is more going on in the bank than just robbery, because the bank robbers were not calling or making much moves.

Then the owner of the bank calls a fixer White (Jodie Foster) to go there and make something he hid in the bank never not come to light.

The fixer has many people she has done things for in her pocket and she decided to use these influences to get close to the robbery scene. Things do not get better when what Keith suspects starts to become more clearer to him and now he has to find a way to stop these robbers and save the hostages. All this while dealing with his own personal issues and White.

The movie was both a critical and commercial success. Other than you having to either pay very close attention to the people and what they say which makes the movie more consuming the only downside in it were the co-stars. Denzel and Clive had their parts beat, but Jodie Foster power as a magnificent actress was wasted here in this movie and so was that of Chiwetel Ejiofor.