Common Sense Note
Parents should know the film includes extreme language (frequent f-words and other profanity, including the n-word). The robbers take the bank with smoke bombs, dress in masks and painters' coveralls, and look ominous throughout; hostages are frightened, with some crying and others acting tough. The film includes sexual language. Characters display and discuss racism (most often, anti-Arab and anti-black). Characters smoke cigarettes and cigars. One crucial plot point involves a character making money by working with Nazis during WWII.
Families can discuss the way the film uses the generic bank robbery plot to evoke more profound social and political issues, like racism, corruption, ambition, and post-9/11 fears about surveillance and terrorism. How do Keith and the robber, Dalton, come to understand each other's motives and goals? How does the movie compare the moral positions of upper-crusty characters (who own or run the bank) and "regular folks," who bank or work at the institution?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
INSIDE MAN begins with a close-up on Clive Owen as he describes "the perfect bank robbery" that forms the bulk of the action. While this heisty plot (script by first timer Russell Gewirtz) includes the sorts of cunning turns familiar since Die Hard, its more compelling aspect is its New Yorkness. The city is everywhere in the film, outside and inside, but mostly, it's the incisive focus, impetus, and consequence.
The detectives on the case -- hostage negotiator Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) and his partner Mitch (Chiwetel Ejoifor) -- appear first at the station, oblivious to the robbery that you already know is in serious progress. You've seen the foursome in painters' uniforms and masks enter the bank -- located, the camera notes from an ominous low angle, at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway -- disable the surveillance cameras, and take all the customers, workers, and security guards hostage.
By the time Keith and Mitch arrive, the crime scene is taped off, a mini-city populated by shooters and uniforms, hulking vans and vocal gawkers. Inside the bank, the robbers dress the hostages like themselves, move them from room to room so they can't get to know one another, and dig up a wall in the storage room. While you and the cops wonder what they're up to, Keith has to make nice with turf-protecting Emergency Services Unit Captain Darius (Willem Dafoe), still mad at him for some case they worked years ago, but also anxious to get this one off quickly and successfully.
As time ticks, the film introduces the bank board chairman, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), who sends a minion, a very well-dressed, perfectly coiffed, excruciatingly intelligent fixer, Madeline White (Jodie Foster), introduced as she's arranging for Bin Laden's nephew to purchase a condo. "Miss White," as she's called repeatedly, gets exactly what she wants when she wants it, at least for a minute: she bribes Keith effectively, she plays Case, she knows how to reach the chief robber in charge, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen). And yet, she can't quite solve this puzzle, which involves a special personal safe deposit box inside the bank (though the answer to this puzzle is Inside Man's least effective move, by far).
In between the figuring and plotting, the film flash-forwards to exit interviews with the hostages, Mitch and Keith cracking jokes, pressing them to confess their collaboration, jumping at or leaning into them to solicit responses. This array -- anxious, audacious, arrogant -- is clearly made up for "New York" embodiments, persevering, traumatized, post-9/11. Appearing in tight shots, the grainy hi-def digital exacerbating their complexities, the interviewees reveal too-shiny surfaces and their pocked faces.
Tense, showy, and shrewd, the movie is, like everyone's been saying, Lee's most generic (i.e., "accessible"), but that's not what makes it brainy or galvanizing. Indeed, its cleverest moments involve odd and telling details: The credits sequence use of "Chaiyya Chaiyya," the white-guy who recognizes but cannot translate Albanian language, and perhaps most energetically, the Sikh who resents being profiled as "Arab."
Thinking he's one of the robbers, the cops tackle him, take his turban, then refuse to return it to him. When Keith and Mitch pull him into the diner they're using for a headquarters and question him, he finally has enough. Tired of being profiled at airports and eyed on the street, the young Sikh wonders, "What happened to my fucking civil rights?" Keith smiles, a little. "Bet you can get a cab though." Competing traumas, leveling oppressions, comparable resiliences. It's definitely New York.
Families who enjoy this movie should see 25th Hour, Clockers, and Summer of Sam, other Spike Lee films that focus on NYC in crisis and recovery. If you're interested in the heisty generic aspects, see Dog Day Afternoon, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, or Die Hard.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentReferences to women's breasts (plus some jokes about men's tendency to focus on breasts); sexual language and discussion of sexual activity; hostages are upset when they're forced to strip (we see them looking uncomfortable in underwear). |
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ViolenceExplosions (inside bank); a man is beaten behind a door (shadows visible and grunts audible), and he emerges bruised and bloody; gunshots, a seeming (and disturbing) execution of a character with a bag over his head. |
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LanguageLots of profanity. Several instances of the n-word (including a video game called "Kill Dat N---a"); over 50 uses of f-word; slang for genitals. |
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Social BehaviorBank robbers, angry cops, corrupt executives: All misbehave, cheat, and lie. |
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CommercialismiPods. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoSmoking (cigarettes and cigars). |
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