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www.reel.com - : Don't be misled by the hyped-up trailers for Inside Man: This is not your average nail-biter of a heist flick, but a clever and witty throwback to the character-driven crime dramas of the 1970s, like Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). Nor is this entertaining mixture of New York grit and gloss a typical Spike Lee ''joint,'' save for the fact that it marks the fourth collaboration between Lee and star Denzel Washington. Although it's a little too slackly paced and has its share of plot holes, the movie is not only Lee's most overtly commercial film, it's his most purely enjoyable ''joint'' in years. more...
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www.dunkirkma.net - : Dalton Russell is a direct and straightforward breed of bank robber, the kind of guy you don’t want to hide things from, because he’ll know, and you’ll pay dearly for the deception. Russell is the antagonist of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man”, a noteworthy heist saga filled with A-list stars and a solid B-movie script, and in one early scene he gets right to the point, before beating a man silly for concealing a cell phone – “My friends and I are making a very large withdrawal from this bank, anybody that gets in the way gets a bullet in the brain.” In a later scene we see that he isn’t kidding, lending a terrific sense of danger to his mission, to hijack the Wall Street branch of the Manhattan Trust Bank, dress everybody inside like painters, as to fake out the cameras and detectives surrounding the area, and make off with a king’s ransom in loot that will set him up for the rest of his life, preferably on a tropical island, “sucking down pina coladas in a hot tub with six girls named Amber and Tiffany.” He has planned the perfect robbery, he tells us in an opening monologue, simply because he can, because as a genius with ice in his veins, he gets off on outsmarting the system, and we see that the plan is pretty flawless, because even when the cops do show up, as is inevitable in a heist standoff movie, it’s Dalton that takes the upper hand, constantly playing mind games with his adversaries in a mental game of cat-and-mouse designed to outsmart the detectives, lead to his escape, and implicate everybody and anybody who was inside the bank as a potential robber. more...
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www.boxoffice.com - : At the core of ''Inside Man'' is a sharp caper/thriller that's well-crafted by director Spike Lee and his group of collaborators, including actors Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster and Clive Owen, as well as screenwriter Russell Gewirtz in his auspicious debut. This thriller about the perfect bank robbery, wherein both the cops and the robbers are genuinely smart and motivated, yet not superhuman nor without humanity, gets as close to very good as any similarly concerned Hollywood feature has come in the past decade or so. By measure, compare ''Inside Man'' to the recent Harrison Ford thriller ''Firewall,'' an empty parody of the same genre that only serves to evoke the memory of better films. ''Inside Man'' will likely be remembered as one of those better films. more...
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Critic Reviews
