Subtext of ‘Inside Man’ works better than its thrills

While Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” works perfectly fine as a thriller picture, it may work better when you consider it as a Spike Lee film. It’s not quite as angry or politically charged as your average Lee effort, but it’s got enough commentary to serve as a cautious introduction to his past and future work. Call it a prelude to anger.

When considering all of this, the primary plot almost seems beside the point. Sure, you’ve got an understandably egotistical bank robber, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), executing the “perfect bank robbery.” (Example of perfection: dressing up all the hostages in the same attire as the robbers, in order to prevent police from storming and shooting.) Then there’s the clever, indefatigable detective, Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), heading up police action against it. Throw in a mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) and the elderly CEO of the bank in question (Christopher Plummer) and mix vigorously. But more interesting are scenes like the one in which one of the hostages, a Sikh, is mistaken for an Arab, his turban stripped away on the assumption he’s a potential suspect (and terrorist, of course). Another scene: the police bug the inside of the bank, eventually extracting discussions in the Albanian language. It takes several tries to determine that it is Albanian; a translator is brought in, only to reveal that it is an old recording of the President of Albania. In considering the robbery as an allegory for a terrorist attack, Lee and screenwriter Russell Gewirtz are making bold statements about America post-9/11, suggesting that the nation is still willfully ignorant of general foreign affairs, even when dealing with past and future attacks. It’s a caustic criticism from folks who remain unconvinced about the War on Terror; whether or not you agree with their position is nearly irrelevant. The filmmakers simply want the viewer to take a moment to question authority and its methods, and that’s all that matters, sometimes.

But then, what can we say about the scenes that almost act as stand-alone critiques? Lee seems to be taking on his familiar targets (racism, social inequality) in unfamiliar ways: there is a brief scene where the bank robber confronts a twelve-year-old kid playing an over-the-top gang war video game not unlike “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.” “Like Fifty says,” the boy explains, “get rich or die tryin’.” Take that bitter pill in tandem with a brilliantly timed scene that is delivered as a simultaneous punch with a major plot twist: a racist cop backs up his subtly racist statements with a disclaimer: “I’m going to be careful what I say. You never know who might be listening.”

The subtextual complaints in both of these scenes appear to be self-contained, but where Lee uses 9/11 as a leaping point, he dives into a form of more general social criticism. The cop has no desire to improve his views on race, but simply to make sure that he isn’t caught expressing them; similarly, Lee and Gewirtz see a culture of status quo in the “Grand Theft Auto” series and 50 Cent-style antics, imbuing society not with a desire to make life better but simply to take the problems and violence of today and glorify them. Lee speaks to a general misunderstanding between cultures that continues to go unrectified and unquestioned for fear of disturbing an already delicate social balance. Not exactly a groundbreaking revelation, but nevertheless a point that must be brought up, and well-spoken.

The rest of the film is, frankly, the kind of stuff that heist pictures are made of nowadays: it’s a twist and turn of plot points and didn’t-see-that-comings, the kind of stuff that illustrates a screenwriter flexing his “clever” muscles and a filmmaker who directs what any average filmmaker could direct. Yeah, the film would work even if you were to shut your brain off. But keeping it on will reveal a more interesting experience. It’s not all stuff you will agree with, but “Inside Man” can be seen as an intelligent work that will introduce unfamiliar viewers to an important figure of cinema-as-political-discourse.