Inside Man (2006)
Spike Lee arrived at Inside Man in 2006 as something of a surprise package: a studio thriller from a filmmaker whose reputation had been built on personal, politically charged work, from the simmering tensions of Do the Right Thing to the jazz elegy of Mo' Better Blues. For those who had followed his career from the beginning, and I wrote about that very beginning when I covered She's Gotta Have It (1986), the move towards a Universal Pictures genre picture felt like a genuine gear change. It was his biggest commercial hit, pulling in well over a hundred million dollars worldwide on a budget that, while not outrageous by Hollywood standards, represented a significant step up in production scale for Lee. The script came from first-time feature writer Russell Gewirtz, whose premise is clean and pleasingly old-fashioned: a heavily armed, meticulously organised gang seizes a Manhattan bank, locks the doors, takes hostages, and proceeds to run rings around everyone sent to sort things out. The wrinkle is that the detective negotiating their release is already distracted, tangled up in his own corruption investigation before he even walks through the bank's front door.
Lee brought his regular collaborators along for the ride, which gives the film a consistency of craft that a director-for-hire might not have managed. Matthew Libatique, who had shot Requiem for a Dream and would go on to work repeatedly with Darren Aronofsky, handles the cinematography here with a controlled, metropolitan coolness: the bank interior is all hard surfaces and fluorescent geometry, while the street scenes outside carry that particular quality of midday Manhattan light, flat and relentless. There is nothing flamboyant about the visual approach, which suits a film that is playing a long game with information. Terence Blanchard, Lee's composer of choice across more than a decade of collaboration, contributes a score that draws on jazz and South Asian musical colour in ways that quietly complement the film's interest in New York's ethnic patchwork. Barry Alexander Brown, another longtime Lee editor, keeps the cutting tight enough that 129 minutes rarely drags, even when the standoff is deliberately treading water.
The cast assembled around the premise is, on paper, about as strong as 2006 could offer. Denzel Washington plays the detective, working a register somewhere between weary and wisecracking, the kind of role he could do in his sleep, which, as I covered in my review of Training Day (2001), is both his great gift and occasionally his limitation. Clive Owen, masked and controlled behind a balaclava for much of the running time, brings a quality of stillness that the film's architecture genuinely needs. Jodie Foster arrives in a supporting role as a well-connected fixer, polished but unremarkable, given too little to do for too much screen time. Christopher Plummer provides the film's moral weight as an ageing banker with something buried in his past, and Willem Dafoe, playing the police commander overseeing the siege, adds texture without ever quite being let off the leash. It is a cast that costs money and, on the whole, earns it, even when the material around them is thinner than it looks. For a point of comparison on what this kind of ensemble thriller can achieve when it really commits, see also Children of Men (2006), which came out the same year and showed how genre and political conscience can fuse under real pressure.
For a film built entirely around a bank robbery, Inside Man is remarkably light on actual robbery. It is a siege picture more than a heist, a long standoff between a detective and a very composed man holding a Manhattan bank full of hostages, and as someone who will happily sit through any heist going, I found that something of a letdown.
It did not help that it kept summoning the ghost of Dog Day Afternoon, another New York bank job turned street siege, which I think is one of the finest films ever made. Spike Lee's picture is nowhere near that league. It is, at best, ok.
A lot of the trouble is that we watch most of it through Denzel Washington's detective, who never seems all that involved in his own film. He edges towards the action, lands a wisecrack, and ambles off again, and the momentum keeps leaking away with him. The most interesting stretch is actually the slow release of the hostages, where Lee's social conscience shows through: a Jewish woman who will not be made to undress, a Sikh man the police rough up on the lazy assumption that he must be a Muslim. It is pointed, of-its-moment material, easily the sharpest thing in here, yet it also draws out a film that has not earned the delay.
And it is all in the service of a payoff that, when it finally arrives, plays as a distinct anticlimax. Build a whole film around a heist and you owe the audience some heist worth the name, some ingenuity to turn over and admire afterwards; this keeps promising that and handing you a shrug instead. It is watchable enough, well cast and slickly made, and I was never bored so much as underwhelmed. Three stars, a perfectly ok thriller that had a far better film hanging over it the entire time.
Inside Man sits in that familiar, slightly frustrating category of films that work better in their constituent parts than they do as a whole. The performances are credible, the craft is professional, and the setting carries genuine atmosphere. What it never quite becomes is the film it keeps gesturing towards being: the clever, layered, replayable heist picture that its own premise promises. Whether you come to it as a Lee loyalist or simply a fan of the genre, it is worth measuring it against what the genre can do at its best. I revisited some of that territory when I covered Man on Fire (2004), another crime picture built around a strong lead performance and a New York-adjacent moral atmosphere, and the comparison is instructive. Inside Man is a decent enough way to spend two hours; it is just that decent enough, for a film with this many pieces in place, feels rather like leaving money on the table.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2006 | Watched: 2026-09-12
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Inside Man (2006) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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