Inside Man

Spike Lee’s 2006 film covers a bank robbery in Manhattan, except the robbery is a trap. The hostages wear the robbers’ clothes, the guns are toys, the execution proves staged, and no money is missing. The tension is not who survives but what happened. Casting shaped the form directly. When Lee let Denzel Washington pick his part, Washington turned down the robber Dalton Russell because the character is masked for most of the film. Clive Owen had the same reservation, so the script was revised to show his face. Lee’s signature double dolly shot lands on one concrete moment: Frazier gliding towards the bank doors right after an execution later revealed as fake. The director’s best known move carries a reaction to a killing that never took place. The film keeps stopping the heist to stage a piece of New York: Vikram, the Sikh bank worker whose turban is pulled off before he is questioned, and the boy playing a violent video game. It opens on A. R. Rahman’s Chaiyya Chaiyya from Dil Se and closes on a Panjabi MC remix. A good fit if you want to know how rather than when, and count the city digressions as the point. Not for you if you want pace and gunfire; even the weapons here are fake.