Inside Man

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This is masterpiece, brilliant performance from the cast especially Denzel and the cinematography is top-tier. Overall it's amazing crime thriller 10/10. tbh Spike Lee is so underrated he really crafted this film well.

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Some people love it, some people don't. well, i am not the kind of person that looks for the little things in movies to tear it apart and call it awful. the storyline was amazing. the idea was genius. denzel and clive owen play good guy vs bad guy, and they did a good job. i didn't think this movie was gonna have "action" in it but the action it had was beyond excellent. the way the robbery was conducted gave the viewer chills because it was so amazing. don't listen to bad reviews, if you love hostage movies and suspense/thriller movies (like hostage, phonebooth, etc) then go see this! you will be guessing until the very end. best movie ever.

I don't know who wrote the other comments for this movie but I have a sneaking suspicion they work for the studio that produced the movie. Why do I say that? Because this movie was terrible. Somebody somewhere wanted to make a New York heist movie, and they got their hands on this weak script. So, as they do with all weak scripts, they threw money at it. They gave it a big budget, a well-known director (Lee) an A-list lead (Denzel) and a few of "thespian" secondary players (Foster, Dafoe and Owen) in hopes of making this "joint" classy. They failed miserably. Instead what you get is a jumbled heist movie with a racial commentary. Think Crash meets Die Hard meets the Negotiator. The dialogue is trite, and the plot really doesn't go anywhere. The actors' performances are as follows: Denzel is the same character in this movie as he is in 98% of his other movies. Dafoe is in it for the cash (nothing wrong with that, he's a cool dude). Foster needed a gig where she wasn't protecting her daughter from kidnappers. Owen is also in it for the cash (nothing wrong with that, he's a cool dude). And Christopher Plummer is the exact same guy he played in Syriana. The music score sucks, and the sub-plot with Denzel and his wife is useless and boring. What do I care about this guy's personal life? If I'm watching a movie like this, I want suspense and possibly some 'splosions, not a love story that goes nowhere. Then there's the whole Nazi diamond thing they stole from Marathon Man. The antagonists of this film, if you boil it down, are Nazis. Nazis. Seriously, when a New York heist movie that takes place in the present has to rely on Nazis, and not neo-Nazis but the ones from World War II, then something is seriously wrong. It worked in Marathon Man thirty years ago. It doesn't work here. In addition to all this awfulness, the movie does not want to end. You're sitting there waiting for it to end and it just drags on and on. Watch this movie when it becomes a movie of the week on television a few years from now.

Let me just lay all my cards on the table, so there are no surprises later in the review: "Inside Man" is frustratingly bad, Spike Lee was the wrong director for this, but I was able to walk away still a fan of Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster. This is a bizarre film, unnecessarily complicated, that assembles a top-notch cast, puts them into a tense situation with all the players in place, and then has nothing to do with them. It's like the writer forgot that you needed a third act; it's all rising action with no denouement. Washington plays Det. Frazier, a hostage negotiator who acts, literally, as if this is his first case. He has the obligatory younger partner (Chiwetel Ejiofor, "Serenity") who exists so Frazier can explain his theories and the obligatory ESU commander who wants to go in and shoot everyone (Willem Dafoe, sadly underused). Owen plays the bank robber, about whom frustratingly nothing is known except what he said into the camera in the trailer. Finally, Foster plays some sort of player amongst the Powers That Be who walks into the mayor's office, demands an update, and is given "every possible courtesy", etc. She serves no purpose whatsoever, not even in a clichéd action movie type of way like Dafoe and Ejiofor. The performances are the only good part of the movie, but there are times when you can tell that the actors wished they were in a better film. They're giving it their all, and they're getting no help from anyone else involved. Spike Lee is up to his usual tricks here, which, in this type of movie, is a very bad thing. The details of the heist itself I won't disclose. I can't. The action is, at best, vague - extremely brief scenes of vaults opening, hole-digging, hostage roughing up, and the usual bank-robber stuff are all the details we really get. It is also inter cut with scenes of the hostages recalling the heist; their recollections serve no purpose except to confuse the audience further. "Inside Man" is curiously racist: the white crooks rough up the black bank customers, the white Foster and the mayor order around Washington, the white cops mistake a Sikh for an Arab and beat him, and even a Jewish hostage was not only a lawyer, but has a nephew who is a jeweler. Washington and Ejiofor are given no flaws whatsoever and are seen mostly being pushed around by everyone else in the movie. The action repeatedly grinds to a halt so Lee can insert quirky little subplots involving video games, Washington's much younger girlfriend and random Albanian women. They're at best unnecessary, at worst, disastrous. If we had been given a director with more focus, there is the feeling that this could have been a lean, mean thriller. But it drags and drags and drags and when we get to the end, we understand why the film stalled for so long: the ending is about as climatic as erectile dysfunction. "Inside Man" looked like it had it all - great cast, good concept, reputable director, but the end result is a near-disaster. It's like someone threw "Dog Day Afternoon" into a blender, drank it, and vomited it back onto the screen. As I stumbled out of the theater, deprived of my money and time, I cursed the screen gods who thought to tease me with such an improbably bad movie. I thought back to a better day, when a movie at least knew what was going on even if the audience didn't, gave us characters who seemed like actual people and served actual purposes to the plot, so that even if we had to wait until the Big Twist to answer our questions, we at least had a reason to still care.