Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

I enjoyed Inside Man.

I thought all the cast were very strong – major and minor players. It’s arguable that Jodie Foster was a bit wasted in a smallish part, but I think you really needed someone with a strong screen presence for the role to work. And Denzel Washington and Clive Owen played off each other well. (Early on it seemed like Clive Owen was going to spend most of the film in a mask, which would have been a bit of a waste, but fortunately he did take it off after a while.) And I liked the fact that all the cops were basically working together well, rather than having a situation where one of them (normally one who doesn’t get on with the main character, and doesn’t agree with his/her methods) comes close to messing the whole thing up for everyone. Initially it seemed like there was going to be this type of conflict between Captain Darius (Willem Dafoe) and Detective Frazier (Washington), but that was actually resolved quite early on.

I liked a lot of the small vignettes, such as the Sikh man who doesn’t want to answer questions until they give him back his turban. I gather this is quite typical of Spike Lee films (I’ve not seen any others), and most of them did come back to the same themes of racism/violence in modern society, but I still thought they gave the film a kind of richness and detail you don’t often get in action movies.

The plot was convoluted, and I liked the way some of it was shown out of sequence (e.g. interspersing the siege with bits from witness interviews). It seemed to be emulating films like The Usual Suspects, although it didn’t achieve the same level of complexity, and the key point was, ultimately, guessable.

Also, it was a bit disappointing that there was once crucial piece of information that was never provided, and at least one massive great plot hole.

Warning: SPOILERS

In the end, I wasn’t actually all that fussed that we were never told how Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) knew about Arthur Case’s past, and the existence of the document in the safe deposit box. It would have been better if we had known, since it was a pretty staggering amount of information he seemed to have at his fingertips, but it didn’t actually spoil things for me. I guess maybe you’re meant to assume that the Jewish person on Russell’s team had some past connection with the events.

The plot hole did rather annoy me. Even if you allow that the police missed all signs of digging in the store room, how come the next bank staff member to go down looking for photocopy paper didn’t think “This room used to be bigger. There used to be an extra section of shelf before the back wall”? If you use a room on a regular basis – particularly if it’s a small one – then you will notice if it changes in size – particularly if you’ve got a week to do so, and you know there have been a bunch of bank robbers inside for hours. I’m not sure how – or if – the filmmakers could have gotten around this problem, but I ended up with a sense that they simply hadn’t bothered. Which was a pity.