Inside Man
First screened in and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Spike Lee. Cast: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Peter Gerety, Willem Dafoe, Ashlie Atkinson, Vincent Colicchio, Kim Director, James Ransone, Peter Kybart, Bernie Rachelle, Peter Frechette, Waris Ahluwalla, Carlos Andrés Gomez, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Cassandra Freeman. Screenplay: Russell Gewirtz. In Brief:
Spike brings atypical directorial discipline to this sleek, wily heist thriller, along with his usual energy and humor.
VOR:④
A minor contemporary classic, but a classic nonetheless. Rare convergence point of craft, personality, popular appeal, and subtle provocation.
When we ask, "Why don't they make 'em like this anymore?" we don't always have to reach back 40, 50, 80 years. Inside Man is one of the great More of These, Please movies of the 21st century. Since it made money, delighted audiences, and tickled critics, it's a mystery why it didn't inspire more worthy imitators. Then again, it's a mystery whenever anyone makes anything this wonderful, especially in a straightforward studio-entertainment context, so it's best just to appreciate Inside Man for the disarming, seductive, hyper-proficient, standalone gift that it is. Especially while you watch it and can't begin to think about anything else, anyway.
Part of Spike Lee's gift as a director (if also many times his curse) lives inside his hyperboles, his distractibility, and his skepticisms about taste and structure. So, I wouldn't exactly want him to lose any of that, even as I admire Inside Man as one of his most disciplined directing jobs over a 40-year feature career. It's very hard to think of a scene or even a shot that's wasted, or an eye-roll embellishment you just want to rip off an otherwise killer ensemble. The best part is that Lee hasn't gotten to this level of taut engineering by just battening down the hatches and going poker-faced overnight. He and his teammates have found all kinds of stretchy, comic, boisterous energies within an ingeniously airtight script and its fundamentally tense, potentially humorless premise. Lee, his cast, and his crew steadily goose the dialogues, the actions, the audience, and each other with levity, style, and private jokes, sneaking half-tablespoons of special sauce onto screenwriter Russell Gewirtz’s already tempting and flavorful recipe. The interspersed, clearly improv’d scenes where Denzel Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor interview the freed hostages of the already-concluded bank robbery are the peaks in this movie’s bent toward surprising merriment, but a rencontre over a hidden cellphone is an early signal of this pattern, and there's plenty more to come.
Beyond managing to stay out of the way of the script’s primary business, Inside Man’s warm, bordering-on-comic personality actually serves the movie's well-maintained suspense. The interview scenes I just mentioned, which start around 24 minutes in, make clear that almost everyone (or maybe everyone??) survives the gun-toting holdup that Lee, d.p. Matthew Libatique, and never-better editor Barry Alexander Brown stage so fearsomely right out of the gate. Something odd is going on with this bank heist movie, even as the heist itself is, from the robbers’ point of view, going perfectly. In that context, The film's surprising range of tones augments the sense that we not only can't tell where the story is going, we may not even know what kind of story it is.
Much of the tremendous pleasure of Inside Man has to do, then, with being right-footed and wrong-footed at the same time. The holdup and hostage crisis are totally gripping, and when we need to be scared for everybody, we're scared for everybody. But especially on this second viewing, almost 20 years after my first, I was just as excited to be immersed in the high-risk, high-energy environment of the movie as to see how and when I'd be suckered, and that world exposed as …something else.
Meanwhile, Washington is looser here than we typically see him—sexier, too, even compared to roles that asked for more of that enticing charisma. (Forced into a choice, I'd have followed Keith Frazier into several movies even faster than I'd have followed Easy Rawlins. Though both would have been nice, and fuck, couldn't we have kept a ball rolling with one of them?) Owen stays precisely and engagingly in his tricky lane. Foster seems a little slap-happy, which is refreshing from her if also a little odd, and Plummer is somewhat tentative. But get past the names you know, because the real gems in the cast beyond the chummy Washington/Ejiofor duel are the hostages, the robbers, the cops, and the folks who might be all or none of those things. A–
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
