Perennial firebrand Spike Lee kept a low profile on his latest film, Inside Man. The preview didn't feature the usual prominent "A Spike Lee Joint"; you had to have sharp eyes to catch his name among the rest of the credits. Same goes for the poster: Lee's name comes as a surprise at the bottom. This might be that Lee wanted to let the film speak for itself, to let it sell itself to viewers without having his name distract people. Or it might be that he's a little ashamed of making what is essentially a genre film. It's not exactly pedestrian, and there are plenty of Spike Lee touches, but the important thing to remember is that in making a genre film, there are certain things you have to pay attention to above all else. First on the list, especially for a heist film (which this is), is to have a plot that holds together. It's on this point that Inside Man fails miserably. The Spike Lee touches carry some of the weight, but sometimes they're merely distracting. They're just barely enough to overcome the film's problematic plot.

This is one of those films where the characters talk about how smart the plot is: the cops compliment the robbers on their ingenuity, and the robbers compliment the cops on their perceptiveness. The robbers are led by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), who leads a daring daylight robbery on a Manhattan bank. He and his associates, all of whom go by variations on the name Steve, take all of the employees and patrons hostage and settle in to wait for the police to arrive. They force the hostages to dress in identical painter's uniforms and shuffle them around into different rooms so that they never know who is in the room with them. Sometimes the robbers pretend to be hostages, and sometimes the hostages turn out to be robbers. Onto the scene comes Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), a hostage negotiator who's under investigation for some money that went missing from a criminal case. He's flashy, dressed in a white suit and Panama hat, and, like most primary cops in the movies, does things his own way, much to the chagrin of his fellow officers and superiors, including the commanding officer on the scene, Captain Darius (Willem Dafoe). He and his partner Detective Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor, doing a decent New Yawk accent) attempt to figure out what, exactly, Dalton Russell wants. It turns out that this is no ordinary robbery: it involves the founder of the bank, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), who enlists the aid of a smarmy go-getter named Madeline White (Jodie Foster) to ensure that his hidden interests are taken care of.

The leads are of varying effectiveness. Nobody does the combination of self-deprecating humor and self-confidence like Denzel Washington, except maybe Clive Owen, and both men are completely at ease in their roles. The same can't be said for Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is so careful with his accent that he fails to make his New York cop convincing; several scenes depend on the interplay between him and Washington, but the hearty ribbing that goes on between them feels forced. Willem Dafoe has the thankless job of playing a character who basically mucks things up because of a personal enmity for Washington's character. Now, foot-dragging and complaining is understandable, but what cop would do what Dafoe's character does just before the raid on the bank? Finally, there's Jodie Foster, who doesn't work in this film. One could argue that her one-note performance is the result of playing a character who in real life would have only one note, but that note struck me as false. Her smarmy, fixed smirk was the only thing that passed for a character trait, something that might have been fine for a lesser role in the film, but it doesn't work on a character so important.

Race and ethnicity are on everyone's mind. I don't know if Lee was attracted to the project because of the emphasis on race in Russell Gewirtz's script, or if those aspects were racheted up after Lee's involvement, but these characters certainly talk like Spike Lee characters. Aside from Washington's and Owen's perfect performances, this is the area where the film excels. It convinced me, as if I needed convincing, about how false last year's Best Picture winner Crash was when it came to talking about race. Both Paul Haggis's characters and Lee's characters have similar preoccupations about how race and ethnicity affect people's interactions, but the difference is amazing. Lee's characters sound like real people; these are the kinds of offhand comments you might hear in everyday situations, and the characters seem to possess regular people's conflicted and often contradictory opinions on race, whereas Paul Haggis's characters all sounded like one person talking through multiple mouths, delivering stilted speeches that sounded more like talking points than actual conversation.

Then there are the Spike Lee visual touches. In a few instances, they work, but more often, they're unnecessary stylistic flourishes. There's a trick of using a rack focus while moving the camera toward or away from your subject (used notably during the diner scene in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas) so that your subjects appear to be sitting still while the background seems to either move away from them or squeeze closer to them. There's no real reason for it here except to say "hey, look what I can do." Same goes for the visualizations of the various methods for storming the bank toward the end; they don't add anything except running time. At 129 minutes, this is too long for a heist film—even a Spike Lee heist film.

But time and again, the film's ornate yet flimsy plot prompted a range of reactions from head-scratching to groans of protest. Far be it from me, who rates Howard Hawks's pathologically confused The Big Sleep as one of the best mysteries ever made, to demand a watertight plot. Crime flicks can earn a lot of forgiveness for plot holes if they make up for them elsewhere. That's the essential problem here: there's barely enough going on elsewhere to make up for the mile-wide holes in the plot. Here's a selection of questions that the film didn't bother to answer. It's not a matter of the film not needing to wrap up all of the loose ends or anything of that nature. These are basic flaws in the engine that drives the film, in approximate order of importance from least to greatest. They're also spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

Who, exactly, would have been fooled by the Hungarian speech ruse? It was clear to me after the first few words that it was a recording—there was only one person speaking the entire time! If you're the police, and two released hostages tell you that there are four robbers, and you see all four outside the building getting the pizza, wouldn't you attempt to capture them? The police know that the robbers forced everyone to strip down to their underwear, and during the post-robbery interrogations, the "hostage" played by Kim Director was wearing a shirt underneath her painting suit; thus, it should have been obvious that she was involved, so why didn't the cops pick up on this? How about this one: How is it possible that everybody missed Clive's hiding spot? There are two possibilities at play. First, they could have reduced the size of the supply room by building a false wall, but what worker in that bank wouldn't notice that the supply room is suddenly smaller? The room was packed wall to wall with shelves, so where did the extra space come from? Second, they could have smashed out the back wall and found a crawlspace, but how were they to know there would be a space there? Either way, there's the case of the big cart full of supplies: where did it go, and why didn't the police think to look for it? Many of the witnesses would have seen the robbers bring it in, and it's nowhere to be seen after the heist, so it must still be there. Why does nobody look for it, or question why it's gone? Much more importantly, how did Clive Owen's character know about the secret safety deposit box and its contents in the first place? Finally, there are two related questions: If there were documents in your possession that linked you to the Nazis, would you keep them, or would you burn them? Also, if you had Nazi diamonds, would you store them in your bank, even in a safety deposit box that was off the records, or would you hide them somewhere more, well, hidden? (And don't you hate it when you miss a really obvious allusion? Case is obviously supposed to be Chase, as in Chase Bank, whose Paris branch served as a banker to the Nazis and froze the assets of Jews. I'm kicking myself for missing this.)

I know this film had more important things on its mind than the mechanisms of the heist plot, but I don't think there's any excuse for it. In that way, Inside Man reminded me a lot of last year's The Constant Gardener, another "idea thriller" that was so busy dealing with its artfully fragmented storyline and its big, important issues that it forgot to be at all thrilling. Surely it's possible to do both, and just imagine how great either film could have been had their makers given both aspects their due.

—April 11, 2006