Roger Ebert is the most devoted and reliable movie critic I regularly read. He’s the only big-time reviewer whom I believe still genuinely loves going to the movies, even though he’s been doing it professionally for eight million years. So what’s his problem with the best flick I’ve seen so far this year?
Save for some fancy (but never headache-inducing, a la Michael Bay) camerawork and a few keenly observed political asides, Spike Lee’s Inside Man feels like it could have been made in 1970. I mean that as a compliment. It’s exactly the kind of movie people say (correctly, most of the time) Hollywood doesn’t make any more. It’s smart. It takes its time and lets us have look around the environment in which it’s set. It doesn’t rely on trite characterization: When was the last time you saw a hostage thriller wherein the SWAT team leader (played here by the great Willem Dafoe) is not a trigger-happy sociopath who butts heads with Our Hero for no reason, but rather a human being who works with Our Hero to get the hostages out safely? And about that hero of ours: Sure, Denzel makes carrying the movie on his shoulders look easy -- he always does -- but it’s a performance with more grit than flash. I love that he cracks a smile when Clive Owen’s bank robber calls him “Serpico.” But for the most part, he’s McQueen-in-Bullitt cool (with a fedora instead of McQueen’s designer sweaters) because he’s McQueen-in-Bullitt professional. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Inside Man is one of those rare films wherein we see the police doing actual policework. Ever notice how most movie cops seem never to investigate anything?
But best of all as the way Inside Man refuses to beat us over the head to make sure we understand the motivation of every single character. Clive Owen, who eight years after Croupier is finally in another movie that deserves to have him, plays the mastermind behind the ingenious bank robbery that is the main action of the story. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know from the trailer when I say he’s after more than money. We watch him do something hazardous and difficult for a reason that remains somewhat ambiguous, but that within the milieu of the heist thriller seems truly original.
The film hints at his motivation. It suggests his motivation. But it doesn’t specifically say.
It doesn’t specifically say.
And I love it for that reason. Because in even in this uber-confessional age of cel phones and reality TV, wherein people seem willingly to give away their privacy far more quickly than the president could ever steal it, some people choose to keep their motives private. Especially people as calm and methodical as the cat Clive Owen plays in this movie.
Russel Gewirtz, who wrote the screenplay, is a first-timer. How the hell did he get away with this? How did he fight off the legions of agents’ assistants and development executives and McKeeites who must have told him, it’s good, but the audience needs to know that Clive Owen’s parents were killed in the Holocaust and that’s why he’s out for revenge, and if you have a scene where he cries and he tells Christopher Plummer, “You killed my parents, you Nazi, and I’m out for revenge!” the audience will love you. Origins are for superheroes.
And yet, Ebert gets hung up on minutiae: Christopher Plummer doesn’t look old enough to have done what he did; we never learn Jodie Foster’s job title, blah blah blah. It’s out of character for Roger not to be able see past the little stuff. It’s even more out of character for him to miss major plot points. Ebert’s review faults the movie for having the bank robbers “throw around completely unecessary smoke bombs . . . alerting a beat cop that something is wrong. Did they want to be trapped inside the bank?”
Why yes, Roger. They did want to be trapped inside the bank. Did you actually see this movie?
To be fair, Ebert probably sees a dozen films a week, and cranks out (usually) lucid criticism about nearly all of them, so you can’t beat him up too much if he dozes off occasionally. His review reminds me of a lunkheaded pan of Die Hard I read wherein the critic thought he was pointing out a huge plot hole when he smugly asked, Why didn’t Team Alan Rickman just rob that skyscraper in the middle of the night, when it wasn’t full of people?
Since it’s entirely probable that Die Hard is not the sacred text for you that it is for me, I will remind you that in Die Hard, Alan Rickman was trying to break into a vault that can be opened only when the power to the building was cut. The LAPD wouldn’t order the power to be cut, but the FBI would, and dressing up an armed robbery as a politically-motived hostage situation would bring the FBI. Or something like that.
The FBI agents in Die Hard -- both of whom, in a nice comic touch, are named Johnson -- are perfect examples of the kind of cartoon hawks that the SWAT leader in Inside Man could easily have been. Die Hard, of course, is a different kind of hostage movie. Inside Man is much closer to Dog Day Afternoon, which it actually references by name. And it deserves the comparison.
