"Inside Man" Movie Review

You can't judge a crime by its cover

Academy Award winner Denzel Washington, Academy Award nominee Clive Owen and Academy Award winner Jodie Foster star in this intense and explosive crime thriller.

The perfect bank robbery quickly spirals into an unstable and deadly game of cat-and-mouse between a criminal mastermind (Owen), a determined detective (Washington), and a power broker with a hidden agenda (Foster). As the minutes tick by and the situation becomes increasingly tense, one wrong move could mean disaster for any one of them.

From acclaimed director Spike Lee comes the edge-of-your-seat, action-packed thriller that The Wall Street Journal calls "a heist film that's right on the money."

If you're a fan or critic of this movie, then be sure to add your own opinions to the "Reviews by You" at the bottom of of this lens...

"Inside Man" Movie Trailer

From a cell, a man tells us he has planned the perfect bank robbery; he invites us to watch. An efficient gang enters a Manhattan bank, locks the doors, and takes hostages. They work deliberately, without haste. A snarky detective facing corruption charges is assigned to negotiate. The bank's president has something to protect in a safe deposit box, so he brings in a high-powered fixer. With an army of police surrounding the bank, the thief, the cop, and the plutocrat's fixer enter high-stakes negotiations. Why are the robbers asking for a plane - they know they won't get one? Why aren't they in more of a hurry? If the job's perfect, why is leader of the thieves in a cell?

Inside Man

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"Inside Man" Editorial Review

The movie is available to buy from Amazon.com in a number of DVD formats:

Inside Man
(Widescreen)

Spike Lee scored his biggest hit to date with Inside Man, an unconventional thriller with fascinating details in the margins of its convoluted plot. The screenplay (by first-timer Russell Gerwitz) could've used a few more rewrites; it moves at a brisk pace but in hindsight a lot of it doesn't make sense.

That makes Inside Man more fun to watch than to think about afterwards (when you discover plot holes big enough to drive a truck through), but it's curiously involving, especially as NYPD Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) struggles to outsmart a high-stakes bank robber (Clive Owen) who, along with a well-trained crew of accomplices, has seized control of a Wall Street bank, turning what initially looks like a hostage crisis into a personal crusade to expose some mysterious evil secrets.

As you might expect from the director of Do the Right Thing, Lee seizes several satisfying opportunities to examine post-9/11 issues of racial prejudice and domestic terrorism, and the mysterious "problem solver" Madeline White (Jodie Foster), as eerily sinister as she is vaguely defined, is worthy of her own movie. With the benefit of his most stellar cast to date (including Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe and Chiwetel Ejiofor), Lee seems more interested in character details than well-crafted suspense, but that doesn't stop Inside Man from being engrossing, subtly amusing, and quirky enough to qualify as a welcomed break from the formulaic thrillers that are Hollywood's bread and butter.

"Inside Man" on DVD

This movie is available to buy from Amazon.com in a number of DVD formats:

Inside Man (Widescreen Edition)

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Amazon Price: $8.99 (as of 07/26/2008)

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Inside Man (Full Screen Edition) (2006)

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Amazon Price: $11.99 (as of 07/26/2008)

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"Inside Man" Movie Download

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