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Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) by Spike Lee
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DVD detailsActor: Christopher Plummer, Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe Director: Spike Lee Brand: NBC Universal Producer: Brian Grazer Producer: Daniel M. Rosenberg Producer: Jon Kilik Producer: Jonathan Filley Producer: Karen Kehela Sherwood Producer: Kim Roth Writer: Russell Gewirtz DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Albanian (Original Language); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1 Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen Picture Format: 2.35:1 Running Time: 129 minutes DVD Release Date: 2006-08-08 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Inside Man (Widescreen Edition)DVD Review: Coulda been a 5... Summary: 4 Stars
Lee himself would most likely (and with good reason) criticize me for this viewpoint, but I have always regarded him highly as a director, but have often felt at least a little disappointed by his films. Even in highly competent movies like _25th Hour_ and _Do the Right Thing_, I have always felt that there was something about the movie, usually a rather simplistic move to get the movie towards a sense of completion, that has held me back from liking it unconditionally. Perhaps it is that need for completion, that sense of making the movie an independent-from-life example for closure, that always keeps me a little away from full acceptance, because Lee is otherwise so good at characterizing beyond the screen--many of his characters exist in a wonderful netherworld of being familiar and gritty while maintaining purpose in the movie. But in the end, the characters become obvious for merely 'being there' to make the film come together in the end when Lee drops the ball, so to speak.
Yet I maintain so much hope for Lee and have more hope in him than in some other directors who DO seem to be at the top of their craft. And I maintain that Lee will make something that is no less than one of the top 10 movies of ALL TIME if he is finally able to let go of cinematic closure and instead let the closure take place in the audience.
This movie works pretty much on the typical Lee paradigm--nothing less than spectacular in its progress, and then falling a little short in the end. Denzel Washington is an ambitious detective looking to make first grade when a bank robbery negotiation falls into his lap. A major bank in NYC has been taken hostage by robbers who seem to have something up their sleeve other than the usual objectives. The bank owner (Christopher Plummer) has a fear of dire consequences should certain items on hold in the bank fall into the wrong hands and hires Jodie Foster to take care of this mess with full discretion.
The film is wonderfully off-kilter in how it presents criminals and villains and heroes--it is hard to see who is who for a long time, at first because of the grittiness of the characterization, but also because of the brilliance of the crime. This film outdoes great depictions of criminal genius like _The Usual Suspects_ and others, for the nature and details of the crime are not all held to the very end. Lee wisely avoids the modern trend of 'twist endings' such as the poor _Saw_ series and Shamalyan's paler efforts and instead lets us into the process, though of course withholding ocasional vital details to keep us guessing at the entire picture.
The plot itself is interspersed with little Lee touches of NYC culture, where cops argue among themselves what dollar bills are made of, and a street construction worker can know the sound of Albanian without being able to understand a word of it. For 7/8 of the movie, you will most likely be kept guessing and even laughing in disbelief, for this is no ordinary crime drama, and Washington of course enlivens his character into a depth few actors can reach...
...but the end of the movie will leave you just a little disappointed. It would seem that a situation as wonderfully complex and intricate as Lee builds for and hour and forty-five minutes could never sum up very quickly and must leave you with at least SOMETHING you'll have to debate with others over some post-theatre Chinese food, but Lee cannot resist letting everyone fade into a cellular dark by the end of the movie, and so things wrap up just a little too nicely. The movie does offer some good challenges as to who are the good guys and who are the bad (there will be just the slightest mention from Jodie Foster that will help, if you listen closely), but in the end _Inside Man_ wants to play with its own title in many different directions, but can't do it all within its own medium. Lee is still on his way to earning the credit of being one of the all time greats, but he's going to have to keep his brilliance out until the end before the title is fully his.
More Inside Man (Widescreen Edition) reviews: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Description of Inside Man (Widescreen Edition)Academy Award winner Denzel Washington, Academy Award nominee Clive Owen and Academy Award winner Jodie Foster star in this intense and explosive crime thriller. The perfect bank robbery quickly spirals into an unstable and deadly game of cat-and-mouse between a criminal mastermind (Owen), a determined detective (Washington), and a power broker with a hidden agenda (Foster). As the minutes tick by and the situation becomes increasingly tense, one wrong move could mean disaster for any one of them. From acclaimed director Spike Lee comes the edge-of-your-seat, action-packed thriller that The Wall Street Journal calls "a heist film that?s right on the money."
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