Inside Man: Film Review

I saw Spike Lee’s new film Inside Man this Tuesday (May 2, 2006). I had read reviews of the film by the critics Anthony Lane and Roger Ebert and they had alerted me to two inconsistencies in the script by newcomer Russell Gewirtz. It is always fun to look for dumb mistakes in plot-heavy movies and I managed to find a few that neither Lane nor Ebert had mentioned. I then went to imdb.com to see if other reviewers had spotted the errors. I read the first dozen reviews of Inside Man listed on the site and found no mention of ‘my’ inconsistencies. So, I thought I should list them here. (Spoiler Alert: I will be revealing parts of the plot.)

A robber, named Dalton Russell, and his accomplices have taken over a bank and are holding hostages. They are after the ill-gotten gains of Arthur Case, the bank’s founder, who had made his money during World War II by collaborating with the Nazis and cruelly ripping off vulnerable Jews.

Roger Ebert has pointed out that this would make Arthur Case a nonagenarian, which is certainly not what the on-screen Case, as played by the patrician Christopher Plummer, looks like. (By the way, this plot line itself came as a small surprise: given the themes and preoccupations of Lee’s earlier movies, I would have expected the baddie to have got rich by collaborating with South Africa’s apartheid regime to bust sanctions restrictions.)

Russell, the robber, knows all about Case’s past and about the safe-deposit box in which Case has lovingly preserved the incriminating evidence: Lee shows us nasty-looking documents with large swastikas and other Nazi markings.

As Anthony Lane and others have pointed out, the movie is silent on how the robber found out about Case’s past and the safe-deposit box and on why Case didn’t burn the documents five seconds after having laid his hands on them.

Russell’s first demand to Frazier, the NYPD hostage negotiator (played by Denzel Washington), is for food for the hostages. Frazier—clever dick!—bugs the pizza boxes to listen in on Russell’s strategy sessions. Russell—cleverer dick!—finds the bug and hooks it to an iPod that plays a marathon speech by the late Albanian Marxist dictator Enver Hoxha. (The iPod’s screen helpfully says, “Enver Hoxha, Speech”.) The language sounds vaguely Russian to Frazier and the other cops. They bring in a Russian speaker and he says that the language being spoken is definitely not Russian: maybe Polish or Hungarian, but definitely not Russian, probably Central European. At his wit’s end, Frazier plays the bug intercept over the public address system for the crowd of onlookers to hear, thinking that polyglot New York would throw up someone who knew the mysterious language being spoken by the robbers. Predictably, a hard-hatted worker walks up and volunteers that he is “one hundred percent sure” that the language being spoken on the bug intercept is Albanian: he doesn’t know any Albanian but used to listen to his Albanian ex-wife speak Albanian with her relatives. Frazier tries the Albanian embassy for an interpreter, but to no avail. So, he gets the worker to call his ex-wife. She shows up and tells Frazier that he has been listening, not to the robbers, but to a recording of a speech by Enver Hoxha. Frazier is despondent at having been taken for a ride.

Before I get to the inconsistencies, let me describe my general frustration with this part of the movie. As soon as Dalton Russell (played by Clive Owen) had made his demand for food for the hostages, I knew that Frazier would bug the food; it was entirely predictable, this is what happens in all hostage movies. But I soon realized that the robber would have to anticipate the bug because, were Frazier’s bugging strategy to succeed, the heist—and, quite possibly, the movie—would be over in two minutes because the cops would then have an overwhelming advantage. As you can see from the plot summary in the last paragraph, this is exactly what happened, except that Lee took forever to tell the tale. Imagine my frustration: I anticipated the bugging and the pointlessness of it and had to sit through a very long drawn out scene to have my instincts confirmed!

Now for the plot inconsistencies! First, why would Frazier play the bug intercept over the PA for the people in the street to hear? At that point he did not know that the robber was aware of the bug. It would be in Frazier’s interest for Russell and his accomplices to not know that they were being bugged. If the bug intercept is played out on the street over loudspeakers would there not be a big risk that the robber would hear it from inside the bank and realize that he was being bugged? Of course there would.

Second, given that the robber was playing a speech—and not a recording of a faked conversation—to the police bug, why would it be necessary for Frazier to figure out the meaning of the words being spoken to realize that his bugging plan had failed? A speech sounds a lot different than a conversation among multiple people. One wouldn’t need to know Albanian to figure out that the speech was a speech and not a conversation among the robber and his accomplices. Cops listening to a speech on a bug intercept would quickly figure out that they were listening to a speech and not to a strategy discussion among a bunch of robbers.

Third, given the inconsistency discussed in the last paragraph, why would Russell, whom the film builds up to be some sort of criminal genius, play the recording of a speech to the police bug? Yes, he may be entitled to a low opinion of the intelligence of New York cops, but why would he take a risk by playing a speech to the bug? I would have thought that he would be ready with a recorded conversation that would plausibly resemble a strategy session between the baddies. That way, he could be sure that the NYPD would spend a lot of time figuring out that their bug had been found out and that they had been played for fools.

In short, Russell Gewirtz’s script of Inside Man was a big disappointment. I did not care for Spike Lee’s unusually leisurely direction either. I did, however, like Matthew Libatique’s pristine cinematography.