Don’t believe the heist

You know if Spike Lee makes a Hollywood-style heist film, it’s going to be imprinted with his idiosyncratic touch. Whether frustrating or brilliant, Lee’s films are always his own. And deep within this Brian Grazer-produced tale is — when he finally gets around to it — Lee’s critique of an America whose power structure is corrupted by greed.

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Clive Owen opens Inside Man as cool-as-ice criminal Dalton Russell, an ostensible narrator, laying down the what, when and where of his “perfect bank robbery.” But despite Owen’s grab for the narrative’s point of view, Lee quickly performs a bait and switch, making Denzel Washington the real action hero as tough NYPD detective Keith Frazier, who hopes to get out from under an accusation of graft by playing the hero. Even poor Willem Dafoe, used to scenery chomping in Hollywood’s action cinema, plays second fiddle to Washington’s brainy smooth operator. It’s Frazier’s world and police Capt. Darius (Dafoe) just lives in it, ensconced in a mobile command center along with Frazier and partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to strategize how best to negotiate with a Manhattan Trust Bank full of armed criminals holding 50 surly hostages.

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As in 25th Hour, Lee’s film is haunted by the ghosts of Ground Zero, its Wall Street location evoking Sept. 11, as well as the glaring absence of the twin towers in one skyline shot. The film also operates as a kind of revision of the godlike valor that cloaked the NYPD after Sept. 11, suggesting instead — in the tangy racial friction that persists — that cops from Frazier to the patrolman on the street are really only human. Lee also implies that in the aftermath of Sept. 11, we live in a new era of mutual suspicion where everyone, from bank robber to hostage, turns out to be a suspect.

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Despite the Sept. 11 mantra of “We will never forget” seen on a building, it’s business as usual in bullish Wall Street, where the bankers are making mad cash and New Yorkers have returned to their lovably bickering, cranky selves. Most of Inside Man’s bits of business center on the volatile, eccentric and opinionated character of New York. The bank-customer hostages, bystanders and cops are a cross-section of society, from the black tween hostage sporting a handgun-emblazoned “Defend Brooklyn” T-shirt to the grizzled NYPD detectives who have time to ogle a girl’s cleavage — in the middle of an interrogation. And in Inside Man, everyone’s a wit and hard-boiled cynic, from the hostage who speculates about who she can sue when the ordeal is over to the kid who tells the cops when the bank robbers release him, “I’m from Brooklyn. They don’t scare me.”

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The most appealing dimension to Inside Man is less the mechanics of the often too-slowly unfolding hostage situation and more Lee’s obvious pleasure in New York City’s quirky character. Lee makes his NYC streets glow with bonhomie and intimacy, adding a compelling luster to this American melting pot. Along with that other consummately New York director, Martin Scorsese, Lee is in love with the city’s diversity and even its bigoted cops, its gum-smacking secretaries, a conservative white bank manager with a booty-shaking cell phone ring tone, and an indignant Sikh who flies into a rage at being mistaken for an Arab. When the bank robbers can be heard speaking an obscure language, Frazier knows he will find someone in the crowd of spectators who speaks the language. When he finally does, she’s a typically deal-making New Yorker who wants to swap her bag of parking tickets for her skills as a translator.

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Inside Man’s biggest flaw may be the eternity it takes to get to the meat of the matter, which is the bond that forms between jaded cop Frazier and jaded robber Russell — both in their own way, inside men — trying to catch a little cash and play the system. “Everybody’s getting theirs, I’m going to get mine,” Frazier says.

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The “Spike Lee Joint,” the line that gives you a sense of what he’s driving at and throws a wrench in the Hollywood heist formula, is one uttered by Jodie Foster playing Madeline White, a kind of all-knowing, tight-lipped, powerful confidant of mayors and bank presidents. Foster is retained by Manhattan Trust President Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) to locate a sinister secret hidden away in one of the bank’s safe deposit boxes that could destroy Case’s reputation.

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White observes that men like Case make their fortune on a bit of market wisdom attributed to the baron Rothschild about buying when the “blood is running in the streets.”

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In Inside Man, it’s hard not to catch how making a fortune from misfortune might also be the name of the game in today’s America. In Lee’s critical vision, America has become a place where the power structure’s greed trumps every human impulse for decency.