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.

Aaron Eckhart's tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor also visits an exclusive, plantation-era gentleman's club in Jason Reitman's indie cause célèbre Thank You for Smoking, an adaptation of Christopher Buckley's arch novel about a few weeks in the life of one of the most despised people, engaged in one of the most despised professions on the face of the planet. Like the surface revelations of Inside Man (that men look at women's chests and that we notice that people are of different races), the revelation of Thank You for Smoking--that cigarettes aren't good for you--is notably beside the greater point that we're seeing a lot of movies now in which people in positions of power at every level are portrayed as venal, ineffectual, opportunistic liars desperately in need of (and/or deserving of) being put down with extreme prejudice.

The obvious problem with Thank You for Smoking is that it's at least a decade past its sell-by date for satires of how we're manipulated by media messages (certainly by the evils of Big Tobaccy); the virtue of it is that it's a tight, slick piece of amoral black comedy centered around an asshole (and Eckhart hasn't been this good since his last great asshole turn in In the Company of Men) who doesn't spend a lot of time rationalizing the evil that he does. It's a film, then, for word junkies and spin-doctors who get off on semantics and out-smarting debate opponents even when they're defending the weaker flank. Its wider appeal, though, is ironically predicated on the extent to which much of its audience gets off on thinking they're gaining some sort of insight into anything other than how deliciously wicked is this yuppie Mephistopheles. (Meaning, essentially, that most have been seduced by the bad guy, which Reitman neatly underscores by portraying the Media as the ogre for Just Telling the Truth. Meaning that for all the liberal drum-beating, Truth is still the bad guy.) So the Devil is attractive. As messages go, Milton told us that in the seventeenth century. We could argue that Eve learned it some time before that.

But Thank You for Smoking is slippery as hell. It identifies the last smokers in mainstream movies as the "RAVs" (Russians, Arabs, and Villains) on its way to manipulating its audience into hissing at an opportunistic young reporter (Katie Holmes) who trades on her--there's that phrase again--"exquisite tits" in order to write an extremely frank, entirely accurate story on the life of a tobacco lobbyist. In so doing, the picture demonstrates that if the last smokers in entertainment are bad guys and Europeans, the last irredeemable wrongdoers are journalists. We're slaves to conventions and images and saucy turns of phrase (another subplot involves the campaign of fey, Birkenstock-wearing Vermont senator Finistirre (William H. Macy) trying to get a skull and crossbones printed on every pack of cigarettes), the film tells us, and then it proceeds to use images and conventions and saucy turns of phrase to manipulate our sympathy with this self-proclaimed shark. The lobby of a Hollywood production company features a big-screen playing killer whales exuberantly playing with dying seals, and the head of said company (Rob Lowe) is reverently said to "really love Asian shit" in the middle of sand gardens and silk kimonos. It's loony-tunes and it's exactly the tenor of Los Angeles, just as the rest of it is exactly the tenor of the Beltway, just as Eckhart (and J.K. Simmons as his cigar-chewing boss, Robert Duvall as a julep-slurping tobacco baron, and on and on) are exactly the tenor of unctuous power brokers, rigging Wall Street and the Super Bowl from a luxury cave in the Bahamas.

Thank You for Smoking is a beauty: an honorary Neil LaBute picture about how easily we fall into moral ambiguity that exposes your own moral ambiguity. Light on the contemporaneous insight, it is instead, like Inside Man, doing the you-Nietzsche/it- Abyss polka. Although there's a lot that's wrong with both, each is saved by this meshuggah audacity regarding the function and potential of film to be genuinely lawless, even ebullient, in describing the ways that monkeys don't ever change. Why fight it?-Walter Chaw

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Published: March 24, 2006