Review: Inside Man

Rated R | 129 mins

IMDB Info

There’s no doubt about the fact that Spike Lee knows how to make a great movie. For two hours, Inside Man is as focused and lean as a Hollywood-style heist film has ever been. Suspenseful and intelligent, I found its plot’s cat-and-mouse-style game to be far more riveting than those of most mainstream films of the sort. From Denzel Washington’s cool collectedness as a detective following a bank-robbery to Clive Owen’s mysterious evilness as the robber, I was genuinely gripped by the film, ready to grant it a glowingly positive review. But then came time for the conclusion, which is, to say the least, one of the biggest third-act cop-outs of recent-memory. Not only does the outcome of the heist-plot that Owen’s Dalton masterminds function as an obvious and boring finish to a previously exciting movie, but also it does nothing to affect the audience’s emotions. After being consistently jarred for two straight hours, as a viewer, I wanted a nerve-wracking finish to bring home Lee a win. What I got was a lukewarm, anticlimactic ending; I left the theatre feeling nothing but disdain for the film. As I’ve said in the past, a disappointing movie is often worse to watch than one that the viewer expected to be bad in the first place. Inside Man’s crap-out of an ending certainly respects this principle.