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Willem Dafoe and Denzel Washington star in Spike Lee’s
Inside Man |
Spike's banking on this
INSIDE MAN - Directed by Spike Lee
Certificate 15
EVEN if ‘She Hate Me’ and ‘25th Hour’ were
exceptional films in terms of filmmaking, every director needs
a hit and Spike Lee is no exception. With ‘Inside Man’
Lee looks at the heist movie from a different angle.
Denzel Washington features as a policeman who attempts to
halt bad guy Clive Owen’s attempt to kill his hostages
and make his getaway from a New York City bank, which has Christopher
Plummer as its executive and Jodie Foster as the fixer. With
a wonderful cast like this, it is hard to see where Lee could
go wrong.
Feeling a bit like ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ where Al Pacino
plays a man caught in the crosshairs of a bank robbery, Washington
actually refers to that character, giving the sense that while
we may have seen it all before in the Big Apple, there is still
horror to be had in familiar crime.
Lee knows too that he needs to have a hit and that the thriller
genre, which he almost covered in ‘25th Hour’ is a
good one. Here, however, he seems to be more filmmaking by the
numbers than doing what he’s made his name with provocative,
out-there filmmaking which upset a lot of people. That said,
if you want the old Spike Lee, there are plenty of his films
available on DVD. This could very well be – the first emergence
of the new Spike Lee – a man who knows the ropes and can
deliver a whip-cracking, hot and heavy, snorting and raging
thriller that has tons of energy even if it lacks surprises.
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