90 - Inside Man review

Inside Man may be a paint by the numbers thriller directed by one of the heavyweights of contemporary film, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a paint by the numbers thriller. You’ve got your plot twists, the hard ass cops and robbers, the MacGuffin, all of those things, and they make for an entertaining viewing experience, though certainly not a memorable one. Alfred Hitchcock was the only great filmmaker that could consistently elevate the thriller material to high art. Director Spike Lee never comes close.

The film covers a couple of days in the lives of various New Yorkers that are caught up or involved in a Wall Street bank robbery. Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), the leader of the heist, has planned this caper perfectly. He takes hostages, dresses them in the same painter suits that his gang wears, and devises a number of ways to subtly screw with the cops waiting outside, such as by looping a taped speech in a foreign language. Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) heads the police detail, negotiating with the criminals inside, his suspicions constantly growing. Russell, clearly a smart and cunning criminal, makes demands that seemingly are designed to be impossible to meet. Certainly this guy knows he’ll never be awarded a jet to cart off 50 hostages, so why bother asking?

The problem, the same as most thrillers, is that we simply can’t believe most of what is going on. Frazier acts like an obnoxious jerk to everyone other than his girlfriend, which never strikes me as a good way to talk to a hostage taker (apparently a D- is an acceptable score in the hostage negotiation course). Similar to last year’s failed Bruce Willis vehicle Hostage, people casually stroll in and out of the crime scene as if it were a grocery store. I believe that police can seriously botch the security of a site, but the only criticism the cops receive are that they use too many racial slurs.

At one point, the shady owner of the bank (Christopher Plummer, looking 20 years too young for the part) hires Madeline White (Jodie Foster, taking too many of these parts lately) to go to the bank and ensure that the contents of a certain safety deposit box are undisturbed. What exactly does White do? Beats me, because Lee gambles that if someone charges a lot, talks professionally, and acts like they’re supposed to be there, then the audience can accept a civilian being granted access to saunter inside the bank and launch her own personal negotiations. He should have bet on red.

Oh well. This sort of formula film should come with a Mad Libs version of a review for itself, where the variance comes in the form of adjectives like "Good" or "Bad". But it does entertain, better than many, and contains a few bright spots. The performances are good, and a scene where Russell examines the morbid portable video game of one of the hostages plays nicely, as does a mini-commentary about a Sikh being mistaken for a Muslim. There are flourishes of intelligence and sincerely interesting filmmaking, but they are so brief I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they were spliced in from other projects. After years of dismal failures at the box office, Inside Man provided Lee with the type of hit that would convince studios to keep giving him money, but I doubt that he would ever include it on a list of his favorites.

2.5 out of 5

89

A few films I've seen lately:

1. Underworld: Evolution- I thought this movie seriously rocked. Much more action than the first one, with tons of sweet toys and a comfort with the material that the first film never quite had. 3.5 out of 5

2. Syriana - At one point during this movie, George Clooney's CIA agent shuts up another character during a planned monologue, telling him he didn't have time for canned lines. This is during a movie where nearly all of the dialogue is made up of conversations that typically go "Pumping oil is a dirty business blah blah blah we acquire oil through sometimes shady means blah blah blah oil is very important blah blah blah." How about something we don't know? 2 out of 5

3. Platoon - I'd seen this in snippets on TV for years, but never the full version, and never uncut. Really powerful war film that perfectly illustrated Oliver Stone's prowress as a filmmaker. Never quite made me care about the soldiers the way Saving Private Ryan did, though. 4 out of 5

88 - Click review

"I’d really like to shake Adam Sandler’s hand and congratulate him for going so far with such a complete lack of talent."
-My father

Perhaps my dad was being a little too harsh. He admits to not having seen either Punch-Drunk Love or Spanglish, two films where Sandler does an excellent job. On the other hand, he did sit through The Waterboy and The Longest Yard, as well as having caught snippets of Big Daddy, Mr. Deeds, and Anger Management, all films that could be blared on loudspeakers in order to force drug barons to leave their mansions during a police siege. I really like the subdued version of Sandler that has occasionally been put to good use, but when the trailer of Click involves more than one joke where he brutalizes his antagonists, I didn’t get my hopes up.


Click centers on Michael, another one of Sandler’s "Man-Boy" asshole characters, as he receives an all-powerful remote control from the Angel of Death (Christopher Walken) in order to teach him a lesson about life (which is a real gyp, because when the Angel of Death came to me, all he did was tell me to stop firing my Glock in the air at birthday parties). Point this remote at things and hit buttons such as Pause, Fast Forward, and even Commentary, and the remote manipulates reality to your liking. I’d call it a Bruce Almighty rip-off if it weren’t for the fact that Click has the exact same writers ("Self plagiarism is style" said Alfred Hitchcock). Like Bruce Almigthy, it gives the hero God-like powers, only for his most clever use of them to involve taking pleasure out of large breasts. Seriously, are men such pathetic creatures that with the whole world in the palm of their hand, all they can do are manipulate boobs? That would only be number three on my list, after wronging those who wronged me and robbing a federal bank.

Alas, along with the boobs, Michael has other plans in mind. His Gorgeous Patient But Weary Wife (Kate Beckinsale, really hard to watch in this crap after her ultra-cool performance in Underworld Evolution) nags him about missed time with the kids, which he promptly zips through, as well as skipping all of the boring parts of domestic life, like foreplay. At work, Evil Dickhead Boss (David Hasselhoff, Lord knows why) stiffs Michael on his promotion, which denotes that he be paused, beaten, and then, te-hee, have bodily functions set off well within his personal space bubble. It strikes me as odd that our borderline psychotic hero has no trouble physically injuring his enemies, but never seems to contemplate simply stealing from them.

The humor remains unapologetically stupid throughout, and the film should have a treasured place at 8th grade slumber parties. Gags ridiculing foreigners, fat people, the elderly are doled out in spades to supplement the several hundred requisite penis and sex jokes. Don’t his fans tire of this repetitive cruelty, the insistence on cramming every stupid joke down our throats from start to finish? Apparently not, because while these films easily break $100 million, Punch-Drunk Love, which seriously examines the Sandler archetype, didn’t crack $20 million.

Surprisingly, the one area that the film touches a nerve is the final quarter, where the remote control starts fast-forwarding through all of the moments Michael has taken for granted. Throughout all of the awkwardly schmaltzy scenes where he bemoans ever trying to zip through life with no downside, he does manage to touch on a nerve. Our time here is finite, and we would be best advised to take pleasure in the smaller moments, even when they don’t seem spectacular. Case in point, even when sitting through another Sandler-catastrophe, there is a bit of joy to be had. Just a bit.


1.5 out of 5