You make mistakes as a film critic sometimes and, unlike a lot of professions, when you flub, you do it for the record. I underestimated Spike Lee's 25^th Hour badly upon its release a few years ago, misunderstanding it, fearing it, seeing it as a mediocre film when, in fact, subsequent viewings have revealed it as possibly Lee's tonal masterpiece. My inclination, then, is to overcompensate with Inside Man by offering it every benefit of the doubt beforehand, during, and now--by trying hard to overlook the first bad Jodie Foster performance I can remember as well as a mishandled denouement that stretches the picture past the point of recoil. But even with a jaundiced eye, Inside Man cements Lee as one of the few filmmakers with the brass ones to comment on the race schism, and to shoot (with assistance from ace cinematographer Matthew Libatique) a post-9/11 New York with the gravity of a heart attack. In his individualism, though, that almost-shrill dedication to pumping fists up familiar channels, Lee raises a few eyebrows (and elicits a couple of grins) for posing his Nazi villain in various desktop-photo tableaux with other twentieth century, profiteering, conservative ogres like George and Barbara Bush and Margaret Thatcher. It's an interesting companion piece to V for Vendetta in that way, at once a melodramatic throwback and a progressive scalpel. It's blaxploitation, seventies paranoia, and the latest Spike Lee Joint from Ground Zero.

Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) has been implicated in an evidence embezzlement probe, but when a New York bank on financial row gets knocked over by a band of eurotrash commandos led by garrulous Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), Frazier's on the case, Dog Day Afternoon-style, partner Bill (Chiwetel Ejiofor) at his side. Inside Man drops that film's title (Serpico's, too), decking Frazier out in a cheap white suit and raffish hat that segue brilliantly into the closing shot of a black man in a wife-beater, standing in front of a vanity while in the foreground, a luscious lady in recline dangles that hat off some manicured, impatient toes. That somewhat reductive instinct to simmer the bones of complexity until it's all a thick soup of familiar saturated flavours makes the picture post-modern in its self-conscious shout-outs to Lee's video library and body of work--and evocative, too, in the surprisingly cheesy desire to honour the double-meaning embedded in its title. There's not so much an "inside man" in the caper of it, see, as the film is about the contents of a man: the various indignities and desires, compromises, and moments of pyrrhic revolt that make the rest of the surrenders a little easier to stomach.

Consider the interrogation of a Sikh teller who complains of being called an Arab and having his turban arbitrarily confiscated by the police, but who agrees to cooperate once Frazier defuses the situation by joking that he probably doesn't have any trouble getting a cab. Or the bit where the identity of one of the robbers hinges on her "exquisite tits" and, after a detainee takes umbrage at too close a scrutiny of said rack, Lee cuts to a woman's sweaty cleavage as she tries to poke a hole in the bank's floor. "You can't hide that kind of quality," says one witness, referring to her shapeless jumpsuit. In this leering and practiced nudge-nudge misogyny, there's suddenly here another statement on the impossibility of disguising a truer nature beneath not only clothes, certainly, but also the veneer of civilization. She is what she is and he is what he is. And lest the naturalistic fallacy be indulged, I don't think Lee is excusing us our animal natures, but rather illustrating--as he always has, in his way--that things are hooked in there a helluva lot deeper than skin and tits.

It's not terribly deep as insights go, but when Spike connects on one of his roundhouses, it feels like the gospel. You look at Christopher Plummer getting a haircut in a "gentleman's club" manned by black men in pastel suits as Foster's frigid, shadowy information broker lays down the law and it plays a lot like a paranoid fantasy of ten Jews in a luxury cave in the Bahamas, rigging Wall Street and the Super Bowl. But then there's Willem Dafoe's weary SWAT captain, or the bank manager whose cell phone is programmed to ring with hardcore gangster rap. Lee's simplicity is as knotty and dense as the tangled thrush of race and gender relations, and by being so bold as to proclaim this shitty, meandering genre picture to be about Nazi gold (no kidding) and the importance of being Shaft, suddenly Inside Man becomes vital and engaging in a way that doesn't end in the scrotum, even if it starts there.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

2.38:1 DVD capture: Inside Man

Universal presents Inside Man on DVD in separate widescreen and fullscreen editions--we received the former for review. Letterboxed at 2.38:1 and enhanced for 16x9 playback, the film transitions smoothly to the format; neither edge-enhancement nor the dread 'Universal jaundice' rear their head, and shadow detail is exceptionally strong. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio could be a tad louder and the mix itself isn't terribly expansive, but the dialogue is crystal clear and both bookend versions of "Chaiyya Chaiyya" encircle the viewer as if forming a conga line. On another track, Spike Lee delivers a typically inconsistent feature-length yakker, although he's a little more enthusiastic here than usual, maybe because--as he says off the top--it's his birthday.

There's a surprising amount of overlap between this and the video-based supplements considering the relative brevity of the latter, but on the other hand, nowhere else will you hear that Spike made the acquaintance of "William" [sic] Dafoe at a urinal. Lee also helpfully singles out ad libs and in-jokes: while I picked up on the Sal's Pizzeria gag, the identity of the actor playing the cop who delivers the pizzas sailed right over my head. Five elisions (in polished 2.38:1 anamorphic widescreen as well) showcase all of the interrogation room fragments in expanded and consolidated form as one twenty-minute sequence. These really get stagnant after a while because of the lack of variables in the setting and how they're photographed (a batch of unabridged faux-news reports is similarly wearying), but Lee's commentary revelation that they were mostly improvised initially finds us watching them with renewed interest.

"The Making of Inside Man" (10 mins.) uses a table-reading of the script as a framing device, with actors of Denzel Washington's calibre bemusedly introducing themselves to the room like it's the first day of school. While a bit too much emphasis is placed on producer Brian Grazer's astonishment that Lee was so cooperative (does he make a point of saying this about every director he gets along with or just the black ones?), the piece emerges as above-average propaganda through its insights into Lee's process--including his method of shooting with two cameras at once--and professional demeanour. Rounding out the disc, "Number 4" (10 mins.) invites the neo-Scorsese/De Niro team of Lee and Washington to wax nostalgic about their previous collaborations. Perhaps most impressively, Universal has nothing to gain by including this, as two of the four films discussed (Mo' Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man) belong to other studios. Only once does the offscreen interviewer actually prompt the pair, asking them to reflect on each other's signature work. (Tellingly, Washington lavishes praise on Do the Right Thing while Lee distils the paternalistic Glory to a single moment.) Amusingly, Oprah is regarded as a shill, albeit somewhat unintentionally. A semi-forced trailer reel previewing "House M.D.", United 93, and "Kidnapped" cues up on startup.-Bill Chambers

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