Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick: Inside Man (2006)
We’re making our way through all of Spike Lee and Denzel Washington’s collaborations this month in celebration of their fifth film together: Akira Kurosawa remake Highest 2 Lowest. One of the boldest and brightest American filmmaking voices of our generation, who has proven to be quite prolific and multi-talented, Spike Lee is a filmmaking force that can’t be ignored. And when he teams up with one of the greatest movie stars of our time or any other in Denzel Washington, cinephiles must take note.
For our finale of this series, we’ll be looking at Inside Man, a bank robbery thriller that co-stars Washington and Clive Owen. When a bank in New York City is taken over by masked bank robberies, it quickly becomes clear to negotiating detective Keith Frazier (Washington) that he isn’t dealing with run of the mill criminals.
Guest Writers
Nathan Flynn
All hail the easy comforts, rewatchability, nuance, and swagger of Spike Lee’s Inside Man. It’s probably his most straightforward “joint,” but it’s also one of the most revealingly his. The film follows Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) as he tries to get inside the head of a criminal mastermind (Clive Owen) staging an unusually meticulous New York City bank heist.
On a big-screen revisit, I found myself thinking: this might be the best cop movie of the past 25 years. Spike takes the familiar pleasures of genre—detective stories, whodunnits, heist movies—and injects them with history, politics, and a sharp acknowledgment of systemic rot. He never kills the buzz of watching a clever bank robber or a wily detective outmaneuver institutions, but he shades the fun with a cynicism that feels eerily prescient of the Occupy Wall Street moment just a few years later.
And then there’s Denzel Washington. Goddamn, he’s the greatest movie star alive. Playing a cop isn’t new for him, but here he’s having an absolute blast—putting so much mustard on every line, savoring every smirk, and commanding every scene. His chemistry with Clive Owen, Jodie Foster (in what might be her best work this century), Christopher Plummer, and Chiwetel Ejiofor crackles, giving the film an electric ensemble energy.
That’s the magic of Inside Man: Denzel is the anchor, elevating every scene, while Spike Lee takes what could’ve been a boilerplate studio thriller and makes it feel utterly singular. It’s the rare film that nails both mainstream accessibility and high-wire artistic intelligence. And while I’ll always be grateful for every Spike joint, this one makes me wish he’d had a Sidney Lumet-style lane, delivering movies like Clockers, 25th Hour, or Inside Man every year—projects that, on paper, could’ve been directed by anyone, but in practice could only belong to Spike.
The Team
Ed Travis
Because I’ve been more or less effusive in my praise throughout this Spike X Denzel series, I’ll admit that Inside Man felt “just good” to me. Denzel is charismatic, the cast is stacked, the twists and turns are well paced and the final reveals justify the whole endeavor, for the most part.
Later career Spike has several titles under his belt like Inside Man, movies that weren’t written by him and don’t feel quite as auteur-driven as his early work. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Everyone’s got to do what they’ve got to do to survive and remain relevant and commercial. That’s not to say that Inside Man doesn’t have more going on under the hood than your average mystery/crime/thriller. It does! But there’s no doubt, for my money, that among these 4 Spike Lee titles we’ve been exploring this month, this one feels the least quintessentially Spike.
What does feel the most distinct, relevant, and “Spike” is the [fully spoilery] concept that the heist, and all the root causes behind the plot of this film, revolve around a billionaire-class white guy (Christopher Plummer) who made his fortune collaborating with the Nazis and who has tried to keep that secret long buried. Inside Man has all the trappings of a twisty cop thriller and heist mystery, but in the end it is about moral rot and compromise and the great lengths our robbers go to in order to expose an entrenched figure of power who harbors dark secrets.
My extremely cynical modern takeaway is simply that… at least Christopher Plummer seemed to have shame about profiting off of collaborating with Nazis? At least it seemed like the exposure of this great sin that condemned many of his own peers to death would actually precipitate his downfall? In today’s shame-free, hate-charged world, it feels like the central premise of Inside Man is a bit quaint and that even the perfect heist couldn’t bring down a Nazi collaborator with no shame thriving in a capitalism with no soul.
Jay Tyler
“They all look the same with the masks.”
In many ways, Spike Lee’s Inside Man feels like his most straight forward film. A bank robbery thriller, it centers on a fair amount of tropes within the genre, providing twists and complications along the way. But about a third of the way in, Lee’s impishness can’t be contained, and he begins to push against the boundaries of the genre he has put himself in. By fracturing time and narrative concerns, breaking out of a narrative structure that pulls you along in a chronological fashion, it allows Lee to start to prod you into trying to see what he is up to.Of course the conceit is to some degree there from the very beginning, with Clive Owen’s Dalton Russell informing you that things will not be as they appear. That he has come up with the perfect bank robbery. That promise sets up a lot of suspense for the viewer wondering if Russell will be able to pull it off. But as you start to see pieces of the puzzle form (the use of masks for the hostages, the moving of people to different rooms to disrupt their sense of who is where, uses of language decoys to delay the police,) you find yourself alongside Washington’s Detective Frazier trying to keep one step ahead.
This is maybe why the final reveal of what Dalton’s plan is feels like the most sluggish part of the film. After ratcheting up the tension for nearly two hours, the final payout feels more in alignment with the Lee playbook. The actual target of the heist is not just money, nor as Dalton argue a sense of greater pride. It is about exposing a form of rot at the heart of American capital, how the means for people to generate and secure vast amounts of wealth will have a core of unsavory, unethical behavior at the center of it. Because Inside Man is a sleek, psychological affair up to this point, the incendiary implications of its final moments feel like a bit of a second beat, not in alignment with what came before. Yes, Plummer and Foster’s side story about a dark secret hidden within the bank is there from the beginning and is alluded to throughout. But a good portion of the movie doesn’t feel like that is where this is going.
As always, Lee’s great eye towards casting and pairing of actors is second to none. Owen and Washington’s chemistry as foes is the engine that keeps the movie humming, and the use of all-timers to fill out the cast (Willem DaFoe as a sleepy police captain who just wants this all to be over is a personal favorite) gives every moment the juice to pull you through what on paper could be a very cerebral and self-serious affair.
Austin Vashaw
Inside Man is one of Spike’s more commercial, mainstream, and approachable films, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, that’s a great thing. Because this was my introduction to Spike Lee. I knew of him as a filmmaker, but it was this twisty crime thriller with a stacked ensemble cast that reached me, through my conventional taste, and made me take notice.
This is a second watch for me, and while I recall really loving this film, I didn’t actually remember much in the way of details. In fact, I was surprised on this viewing at how open-ended it left things. I felt like I remembered it wrapping up neatly but really we just have an uneasy calm, with some hints of where the plot threads might go next. The dust has mostly settled, but could get kicked back up again easily.
Denzel is great here, and one thing I love is the key shot of him rapidly “floating”, almost motionlessly, through the street chaos, a depiction of his mental state of anguish and hyperfocus. It floored me the first time and I was again impressed by it on the rewatch.
Inside Man is also a terrific showing for Clive Owen, smack dab at the height of his career in the middle of an epic run that included Sin City, Derailed, Children of Men, and Shoot Em Up all in quick succession within a mind-blowing three year period.
Like Ed, I agree this film doesn’t feel as intrinsically “Spike” as most of his films, but it’s still great. A sharp, beautifully acted thriller with lots of surprises and warring motivations. It’s great!
Next Up on Two Cents Film Club:
School’s back in session with a selection of student-themed picks for September!
