IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name Theatrical Review of 2006...

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- IvanF's Mycrowsoft Noname Brand Website -
- noname writing online since May 2002 -

"When I first heard of the title, "Inside Man", long ago? The first thing that came to mind, was a clever heist movie...

All I do know, is that Inside Man is absolutely the most straight-forward heist movie I've ever seen in my life. I mean, there is literally only one small twist at the end of the movie (which I won't spoil here, otherwise there would be zero reasons to go see this movie in theatres), while everything else is spelled out for us as the directors and writers hold our hands...

I know, I know that Clive Owen in his opening soliloquy even pointed out the fact that this wasn't really a film about the who's or what's or where's or why's, but really about "how" it all went down in the end... making Inside Man about as damn exciting as a late night news broadcast, really...

Seriously, Inside Man is simply two hours worth of Clive Owen and Denzel Washington just jarring at each other, as both sides try to bide their time for absolutely no payoff or dividends in the end whatsoever...

I'm sorry, but the characters in this film were just plain stale and dull at best. I mean, I thought that Jodie Foster would've at least managed to lighten the mood a bit, considering the make-up artists did do the Basic Instinct 2 job on her and tried to hide every single wrinkle on her face... She played Madeline White, dressed all in white, but as down and dirty as bitchy as any Lana Lang you've ever met beforehand. The thing is, she didn't actually do or achieve anything in the movie, past her one generic line of, "my bark is worse than my bite"...

Let me just lay the whole plotline of the story out for you. Clive Owen and his merry band of Robin Hoods decide to loot the first bank created by Christopher Plummer back during World War 2. And if WW2 doesn't start up the Cold War sirens for you, then I don't know what will... Basically, Clive Owen wants nothing to do with the money in the vault, as probably his only decent line in the film came when he called the paper and supplies room in the building basement as "beautiful". His character basically calls himself a martyr, wanting to use the heist to expose Plummer's WW2 guilt to the police and the rest of the world after so many years of cover-ups...

You'd think that Spike Lee would've saved some sort of surprise for later, yet we learned all the above shit within the first half hour of the movie alone. Then comes in Madeline White, the queen bitch of the show who WWE fans might refer to as the Tyson Tomko of the film, the "problem solver"...

She has a completely vague and ambiguous role, in the sense that she merely has so many connections that she was easily partitioned by the mayor right into the thick of things, to cover things up again for Christopher Plummer's character when push comes to shove. The problem is, her role went absolutely nowhere in the end, as besides just a hardy chat to chat with Clive Owen? She didn't actually do a damn thing for her job as a sexy, hired goon...

Clive Owen did have a few moments, perhaps. He got a few chuckles (and a few hell yeah's) from the crowd when he asked all the hostage women to strip down to their undies. Or at least he got those cheers, until he gave the same orders to the 80 year old women there as well... But Spike Lee had spent the whole movie trying to make his character of Dalton Russell interesting, even going so far as to make the Englishman quote the Bard in what we were led to believe was a prison cell. But I'm sorry, but considering a) there was absolutely zero twists in the movie whatsoever, and b) his fucking name was "Dalton" of all badass names, why the fuck should we care about his character again?...

It was obvious from the getgo what he was trying to do. The only true mystery was what they were doing with the paper storage room, and that's about it... Besides that, why the fuck would we care about a heist movie when the goals and objectives were all outlined in fucking bold letters and bulletpoints, the very moment we got to hear Clive Owen begin to suck up to the damn children of hostages? He was a nice guy, plain and simple, and wasn't going to hurt a fly. He was a bank robber, perhaps, but his agenda just became far too predictable and far too slow the moment that he showed us that Nazi-branded symbol from the safety deposit box...

And any movie with the fucking Sony PSP in a starring role?... has just got to die a horrible, horrible death in my goddam book...

Simply put, thanks to god-awful scenes of Clive Owen showing concern for the violence-obsessed youth of the world, we knew he was stalling for time, just to get the police outside to keep asking questions. The problem was, Spike Lee decided to almost run the damn film in real time in the fucking end, forcing us to over two fucking hours of length of just the two sides of the war sitting around, getting fatter by the McDonald's moment, as they contemplate the meaning behind the weight of currency at Grand Central Station...

If there was one saving grace to Inside Man, it was Denzel Washington. He certainly didn't put on a Training Day performance or anything, but at least he put on a lot of weight for his role as a donut-loving police detective... The thing is, despite all the little moments of his inner workings, when he was thinking long and hard for just what the fuck Clive Owen was getting him to do? Even Denzel was wasted in his role, by having so many of his scenes taking place in the future (so to speak), with piss poor humour as he kept drilling all the suspects from the scene of the crime on just whodunnit in the end...

Fuck, it's sad that his best scenes came with Willem Dafoe, the police pylon in the background. God, wasn't Detective Frazier supposed to be smart, yet he never once noticed the Green Goblin jackass acting all suspicious in the background?...

Well, that's the thing that I expected from Inside Man. Did Willem Dafoe do it? Did Jodie Foster do it? Did Christopher Plummer somehow orchestrate it all with a plumming wrench in the diner? Was Denzel Washington the man to blame? Where are the fucking clues?...

The law of pretty much any good heist movie, is that the one who did it?... is always the last person you would expect...