Inside Man

There are films of substance, and then there are films that give the illusion of substance. “Inside Man” is the latter. Whenever a film begins with the principal actor staring into a camera prefacing the story, immediately my bullshit detector screams, “RED ALERT! RED ALERT!” In this case, the bullshit begins with Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) telling us, “Pay close attention to what I say.” This is, of course, a way of telling us that the payoff to the movie isn’t really to be found in the course of the story, but what it supposedly will add up to in the final, inevitable, revelation. Thus, it’s reduced to essentially a trivia game in which the object is to see who can remember to keep track of the potential clues to the outcome.

The problem is, this amounts to a shell game in which the complete lack of story and character development is obfuscated by the intensity of verbal origami and cinematographic handwaving. The film begins with a montage of every possible indicator that, yes, Virginia, this film takes place in the financial district of Manhattan. In case you forget, they throw in a few seconds of a rather well-known bull sculpture and a Wall Street sign. There’s only one historical landmark missing, if only because it no longer exists.

While people are in line at the Manhattan Trust Bank, a man—presumably Russell—enters dressed as a painter. Though the four robbers use loud, assertive shock tactics, the film tries to move into the realm of intelligent suspense by requiring that the robbers have anticipated more than the usual share of potential plotholes. Numerous hostages are moved around after having been required to strip and change into outfits identical to the robbers’.

Two subplots emerge. One involves the bank president, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), who plays the role of the Executive Acting Suspiciously and therefore must have something rather unsettling to hide. Another involves Madeline White (Jodie Foster), a negotiator of sorts, who is called upon to protect Case’s interests. And then there’s Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), the Cop Under Investigation who is also the Minority Cop Struggling to Get Promoted, who also has the Model-proportioned Black Girlfriend with Studio-Approved Crossover Appeal, and the Junkie Brother (read: “family stain”) of Law Enforcement Agent. I’m describing their roles in archetypical fashion because it suits them—really, nothing more to these characters.

As in most Spike Lee films, the woman in Frazier’s life is nothing more than a pretty object of desire to whom he makes reference in passing as though she were a possession and not a partner. The brother is a two-dimensional prop to give Frazier the appearance of a family, without having to actually examine the idiosyncrasies of it.

The shallow cleverness works for a while, until Lee’s story begins to drag and he inevitably falls back on obvious gimmickry—e.g. shaky-cam, snorri-cam, deus ex machina, etc. While he could have messed with the audience’s head regarding Russell’s identity and whereabouts, oddly Lee chose not to; we always know which one’s Russell and exactly where he is at all times—save maybe one, though even if you missed it, when it’s run by you again in the final montage, you won’t feel like you missed much.

You might be left wondering why “Inside Man” seems so underwhelming by the film’s end. There’s a very simple explanation for that: The diversion-driven story is so mind-numbingly lightweight it could have easily been condensed into less than fifteen minutes. In fact it was: In the remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair,” when Crown (Pierce Brosnan) uses a similar diversion to distract an entire art museum and its security staff while he slips out. This isn’t the kind of story that can really occupy the full length of a feature film, unless of course you’re fooled into believing something more actually happened.

Lee could have written a book on overt metaphor: Shots bathed in diffuse glow beat us over the head with the impression that we’re seeing these events out of chronological order. Isn’t it kind of insulting to you, the viewer, when you know can ascertain that from the dialogue itself? We know that hostages can’t be detained and questioned in a police station at the same time that they’re being held in the building with Russell. In one instance, a platform-camera shot (the aforementioned snorri-cam) that makes it appear as though Frazier is floating toward us seems so entirely out of place given the genre and the completely random peppering of art-house techniques throughout. It’s as if Spike Lee wanted to throw every technique he could think of into this film. If that weren’t enough, there are less-than-subtle jabs about racism here and there. Ironically, the only one that works without being painfully overwrought involves a Sikh whose flustered ramblings about security checks at airports (“random, my ass,” he says) are comical yet revealing and poignantly illustrative regarding the state of racial relations.

By contrast, note that even by the end of the movie, Lee’s attempting to hamfist one last message: Frazier is inexplicably dressed in a white, Harland Sanders-style Palm Beach suit and candy-stripe bow tie, playing perhaps house negro to White, whose grey business suit, angular pumps and sandblasted calves imply a degree of influence that’s already been lorded over him several times. It turns out that someone, most probably White, pulled strings to get Frazier that promotion to Detective First Grade. While I admire Lee for his ability to raise social issues to the fore in movies as astonishingly good and richly detailed as “Do The Right Thing,” such contrived stratifications serve little purpose in a suspense flick—ignored by audiences in favor of the all-important twist that they’ve been blitzed into craving so much they seem to have all but lost their appetite for good, old-fashioned neorealism.

In a way, the film loosely reminds me of John Singleton’s “Higher Learning,” which contains numerous subplots all trying to contain meaning, ultimately giving us several half-baked stories instead of one cogent whole. No amount of incomplete storylines can equal the power of one thoroughly developed. It’s as if Frazier is given as many obstacles as possible to work against to artificially imbue his character with value. Who is he when, for example, he’s not telling off a racist cop? We don’t really know, and therefore we don’t really care whether he gets his man or not. Maybe that’s not the point of the story, but then, without giving away any key elements, those characters who are central to the real subject of the film are also not fleshed out well enough for us to care about what happens to them one way or the other.

It’s more interesting to watch, for example, a documentary like “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” in which your abject hatred for Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling bubble, brew and froth up, and your admiration for the whistleblowers patiently and steadily unfolds as you witness them pursuing the truth from positions of significantly less power and influence. It’s because our understanding of these people is gradually built up that we care about them.

Some, as I understand it, are comparing “Inside Man” to “The Usual Suspects” in terms of its twist factor. I say it’s not even close. The difference is the build-up. By the time “Suspects” ends, whether what you think you know is factual or not, the storytelling has built up an admiration for certain characters central to the underlying truth that hides beneath the seemingly routine crime story without necessarily compromising the characters’ true roles prematurely. By the end of “The Usual Suspects,” you’ll feel like you know a great deal about the relevant characters and relevant story (or at least your perception of it), and thus when the twist comes you’re more likely to be floored by it than ho-hum about it. Even if that emotion arises out of a sense of betrayal, it still bears a jarring effect.

Whereas “The Usual Suspects” slowly builds to a crescendo, “Inside Man” starts with an intriguing premise, but sputters along from there and nearly passes out at the finish line.

Inside Man • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Running Time: 129 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for language and some violent images. • Distributed by Universal Pictures