Inside Man?

DIRECTED BY: SPIKE LEE
STARRING: DENZEL WASHINGTON, CLIVE OWEN, JODIE FOSTER, CHIWETEL EJIOFOR *****

IT'S easy to forget that Spike Lee is one of New York's greatest film-makers. Casual film fans will always associate the city with Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese, yet in the last 20 years Lee has arguably made more effort than any other film-maker to capture and reflect the changing mood of this teeming metropolis.

Scorsese himself cited Do the Right Thing as a prime influence on Gangs of New York (he also produced Lee's ambitious, if flawed, adaptation of Richard Price's New York drug drama Clockers). Jungle Fever was a provocative look at interracial relationships in the city in the early 1990s.

Summer of Sam did a good job of exploring the paranoia and homophobia coursing through New York's Puerto Rican and Italian neighbourhoods during the disco era. His 2002 effort, The 25th Hour, meanwhile, was the first major US film to explicitly examine the post-9/11 fears bubbling away beneath all those images of resilient New Yorkers the media were so fond of showing us (just check the incredible sequence in which Ed Norton's convicted drug dealer rails against every ethnic group in the city's five boroughs before finally accepting responsibility for his own actions; it exposes recent Oscar-winner Crash for the inch-deep exploration of prejudice it really is).

With his latest film, Inside Man, Lee once again takes the pulse of the city and makes trenchant points about how racial tension in the 21st century has been transformed by the fear of terrorism. However, what's remarkable about the film is that he's managed to do this while serving up a slick, highly entertaining heist thriller.

Inside Man is Lee's most commercial and mainstream film to date, but it's commercial and mainstream in the best possible way. It has a tightly constructed story that sweeps you right up. It has big movie stars acting up a storm. And it is exciting and intelligent. That's a tough trick to pull off. The last year or so has seen any number of genre films crash and burn because they've tried to make politically relevant statements, usually at the expense of narrative and dramatic coherence. Inside Man never makes that mistake. Lee's smart enough to be able to weave whatever he wants to say into the fabric of an entertaining film, so there's no need to pound us into submission by giving Inside Man an inflated sense of its own importance. In short, Lee never forgets he's been charged with delivering a sizzling heist thriller.

The heist in question takes place in a grand old bank in the heart of New York's financial district. Lee sets the scene with breathtaking proficiency: four intruders, armed with AK-47s and dressed in overalls and masks, take over the building and corral 30 or so hostages into the downstairs vault, where they're dressed in identical jumpsuits. The robbers are led by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), who claims to have planned the perfect robbery. Well, they all say that, but in this case it might be true. Like a human protractor, he seems to have all the angles figured out and doesn't seem unduly concerned when the robbery quickly develops into a siege situation akin to something out of Dog Day Afternoon, a film explicitly referenced by the police department's chief hostage negotiator, Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington). When Dalton demands a private jet to fly him and his cohorts to freedom, for instance, Frazier smells a rat, because, as he informs his partner (Chiwetel Ejiofor), thanks to Sydney Lumet's 1973 classic, everyone knows such getaways are never successful.

Frazier, a charismatic charmer with a penchant for Panama hats, thinks Dalton is up to something more than simply hitting the bank for cash - a suspicion given some weight by the arrival on the scene of Madeline White (Jodie Foster). She's a shadowy character whose job seems to involve fixing problems that are potentially ruinous to the rich and powerful. In other words, she's kind of like the A-Team for malfeasant corporate bigwigs. In this instance she's been hired by the bank's CEO (Christopher Plummer) to retrieve something from a safety deposit box that he'd rather have back in his possession.

Lee turns this dynamic into a quite dazzling stand-off between the lead characters, with Foster and Washington in particular relishing their subtly confrontational scenes together. As Dalton's plan comes into clearer focus, he also manages to keep things rattling along so that we don't get ahead of the action.

However, Lee really ups the ante by inter-cutting the drama with interrogation scenes which take place after the siege is over. It's in these sequences that the film pulsates with contemporary anxieties. Each hostage is treated as a suspect upon release, and the film crackles with tension, never more so than when a bank teller is released with a suitcase tied around his neck. "Shit, he's an Arab!" screams a nervous cop. "I'm a Sikh," replies the hostage, terrified and angry. For Lee, the notion of New York as a melting pot is a myth, which is why he's as relevant today as he's ever been.