"Inside Man"

March 24, 2006 | The real New York and the New York of the movies are often two vastly different places: Filmmakers sometimes lavish loving attention on certain locations and visuals -- the country-in-the-city greenery of Central Park, the Empire State Building's art deco spindle -- and still get the vibe entirely wrong. Even though the New York of 2006 is a very different one from the New York of 1976, when it comes to putting New York on-screen, gritty, edgy and, yes, rude,are still considered crucial buzzwords. Maybe that's because, while the lower crime rate and a cleaned-up Times Square make for a far more manageable city experience (for tourists and residents alike), as moviegoers we can't help feeling nostalgia for the old New York, the dirtier, more dangerous one, that made for so many great movies of the '70s -- pictures like "Taxi Driver," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Serpico."

With "Inside Man" -- an ostensibly straightforward, old-fashioned heist movie -- Spike Lee brings together the old New York and the new. He has a feel for the city that relatively few other filmmakers do, a knack for capturing not just the things people say to each other and the way they say them, but the way the city seems to be carried -- maybe even powered -- by the rhythm of their overlapping sentences: That symphony of speech is the city's greatest source of vitality. Lee marries his vision of the city the way it is now with a fondness for the way the movies were then. "Inside Man" isn't your typical modern cop thriller, with lots of noisy shootouts and rapid-fire choppy cutting. It consists, mostly, of people just talking to each other, the sort of movie that shows the kind of energy and attention to detail that, say, Sidney Lumet brought to "Dog Day Afternoon," one of Lee's inspirations for this picture.

Lee practically hands us the ending of "Inside Man" at the very beginning. But no matter how closely you watch, or how clever you think you're being, you'll never pick it up. As master thief Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) calls it in the movie's opening scene, this is the story of the perfect bank robbery -- but one in which no money is stolen. Russell and a gang of anonymous baddies, disguised as lowly painters in work clothes, quietly storm a New York bank, one of the older, classier ones, with art deco friezes and the kind of elegant marble lobby that makes people want to save money rather than spend it. Russell and his gang order everyone to the floor, and, after shutting down the bank, bully their hostages into first handing over their cellphones and then stripping down to their underwear. The robbers then make a special request of their hostages (I won't tell you what it is) and then herd them, in groups, into several locked offices. Then they get to work.

Denzel Washington is Keith Frazier, the detective who, with his partner, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), has been assigned to the case. Christopher Plummer plays Arthur Case, a creepy captain of industry (with beautiful manners, of course) who fears that the bank heist will force his darkest secret into the open. And so he hires one mysterious, chilly chick, Madeline White (Jodie Foster) -- her job is never clearly defined, but she's sort of a high-class Ms. Fixit for the ultra-rich -- to negotiate with the robbers: One of the movie's sly little jokes is the way it runs with the notion that the Arthur Cases and Madeline Whites of the world assume that bank robbers will be happy to listen to what they have to say, simply because of who they are.

Next page: Jodie Foster rules the movie like an ice queen