Inside Man (2006)

While there have been many great heist movies in the recent past, from Ocean's 11 to the Usual Suspects, The Inside Man is a newcomer on the scene that I am MOST excited about.

I went into this movie with half-hearted expectations, hoping for something fun and curious about Clive Owen's performance. I was expecting Denzel Washington to do his normal Denzel "I'm a good guy doing bad things for a good reason" routine. I was expecting some naive oversight of some detail to haunt me in the end as the "shocking conclusion" and call it a day.

Oh, expectations. How they deceive.

As a good change of pace, the movie was - get this - rather artistically directed (for an action film). There were great flashback scenes, a beautiful introduction to Clive Owen's character, and a few Spike Lee surprises that I should have expected but didn't. I think that's what really made this movie, Spike Lee's vision. Without it, the movie would go completely unnoticed in a sea of other heist films.

Also worth noting is a new side of Jodi Foster, of all people, who I thought would fall off the face of the earth without a great movie to pick her back up. This might have very well been that movie. I have a new respect for her versatility, but at the same time she returned to her tough-girl Silence of the Lambs roots. Good stuff.

It's nice to see that a movie like this can be made today, that isn't about the shocking riddle you couldn't solve before the movie ended, or about the actors getting their name out, but just a good solid bank robbery. If you think about it, the best heist you could ever hope to accomplish would be one of the simplest plans you could come up with, and that's just what happens here. I rank it very highly in my list of favorites, and I'm just as surprised about this as the next guy, believe me.

Denzel Washington is always going to be Denzel Washington, the John Q character we all know and "love" (I use the term loosely, to refer to a broader audience of middle aged movie goers that just eat up anything he breaths on, much less stars in). He diverged from this a little for this movie, he was a little rougher, a little more of a man's man, a little more of a cop's cop, and not some diluted stereotypical Denzel character.

Also of interest, the Montgomery Police Department purchased the command center used in the filming of the movie (the big huge "on the scene" police headquarters charter bus with cameras and meeting tables and all that jazz) and will be making it their own for actual use in the city sometime this year. Ha.