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Tipping the scales of (in)justice

Spike Lee's career has had as many lows as it has highs, yet they've both been consistently phenomenal. When he succeeds, he creates something like Do the Right Thing or Clockers - culturally volatile, formally masterful, emotionally devastating, and cinematically fresh masterpieces. When he fails, he creates something like She Hate Me, which is worth watching only for its baffling incomprehensibility. In something like Bamboozled, meanwhile, Lee's seismographic highs and lows intermingle and clash constantly, deflating a vivifying and prescient cultural commentary with some frustrating caricatures and narrative derailment. Whether each of his particular releases is good or bad, however, they all seem to be the work of a singular auteur whose shortcomings are nearly as fascinating as his strokes of brilliance.

Inside Man would seem to be an unthinkable departure for Lee: something that's neither infuriating nor electrifying, but simply floats by on generic steam. It is, in its most basic plot outline (and even its cast), Lee's most conventional studio effort, and for a good twenty minutes it indeed seems like this latest Spike Lee joint has a rather muted buzz to it. Yet stick with its (admittedly convoluted) plot and you'll find an abnormally ambitious and meaty heist flick.

Denzel Washington, somewhere between Malcolm X and Man on Fire modes, plays Keith Frazier, a hostage negotiator/detective with the NYPD who, with his fedora and anachronistic costuming (and Terence Blanchard's jazzy score behind him), seems like a film noir relic launched into the crime-ridden streets of Manhattan. He's sent to a hostage situation in which Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and a gang of masked thieves have taken over the Manhattan Trust bank, yet as a bevy of shady characters (including Jodie Foster's tellingly named Madeleine White) emerge and a bank robbery that seems unconcerned with money and hesitant to commit violence unfolds, the situation reveals itself to be more baffling (and less generic) than it would first appear.

I don't want to overstate the appeal of the film: as interesting as it may be, at heart it's still a genre film, and underneath its unexpected themes are a group of characters defined by cliches and dialogue that lapses too often into simplistic banter. And while it may be much more ambitious than most heist thrillers set out to be, it's also much safer than most Spike Lee films set out to be. Although one can't fault him for incorporating his typically provocative style with a straightforward genre film, it is disappointing that he seems to want to say so much more, yet seems stifled by the mechanisms of Russell Gewirtz's screenplay.

That said, Inside Man, not unlike last year's A History of Violence, utilizes action setpieces and seemingly generic violence to subvert our expectations of crime and justice, of success and violence. In Inside Man's post-9/11 Manhattan, one of the bank's Sikh employees, after being released as a hostage, is roughed up by the police, who confiscate his turban and demand to know if the robbers have planted a bomb on him. A young black boy from Brooklyn plays a Grand Theft Auto-like game in the bank's vault, telling Dalton that he'd get major points for robbing the bank (to Dalton's obvious dismay). And thanks to the thieves' ingenious plan of dressing up all the hostages in masks and jumpsuits, when they all pour out of the bank's front doors, with the "villains" intermingled with the hostages, the NYPD simply pelts all of them with rubber bullets, wrestling them to the ground and interrogating them for hours. The police force commits nearly as much violence as the "villains" themselves, a subversion mirrored in the fact that Dalton is stealing from somebody vastly more immoral than he is. A History of Violence is more adept at manipulating genre form than Inside Man is, but both films present a welcome and intermittently fascinating revision of crime-movie tropes.

Perhaps it's true that Inside Man is less risky than most of Spike Lee's other films, and consequently less electrifying. The film's generic proclivities and Lee's dynamic commentary seem to hold each other in check, creating a film that is neither as brilliant nor as disastrous as it could have been. Yet Inside Man's fleeting perceptivity is hardly something to criticize, and although we are aware that Lee is capable of doing much better, Inside Man is still identifiably the work of one of America's few filmmakers who always has something to say.

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