Inside Man
By Saw Inside Man on Saturday. I was quite pleased.
There were a couple of obvious problems. The score, until the very last scene, was intrusive and annoying. The payoff, admittedly, was good, but didn’t make up for the rest of the soundtrack. The last thirty minutes had a clunky, taped together feeling. Having already revealed everything important, Lee had trouble stringing the final act together. We knew about the important decisions made my Owen and Washington, and about the secrets that Plummer harbored. Not all that much left to say.
That said, lots of positive qualities. The performances by Washington, Dafoe, and Owen were predictably good. The plot was interesting enough, last act notwithstading. I liked Lee’s presentation of the NYPD; movies like this all too often descend into the Die Hard template of assuming the radical ineptitude of police organizations in the face of a major heist. The NYPD, however, looked extremely professional on every level. It’s not so much that I like seeing police department portrayed in a positive light as that it was genuinely different than the typical presentation in such a film.
Lee also displayed the eye of a New York filmmaker. On every visit I’ve had to Manhattan I’ve seen lots of scaffolding; lots of building are always under construction or repair. Even in Law and Order, I don’t think I can ever recall seeing scaffolding in a cinematic depiction of New York. Lee shows us scaffolding in the first ten minutes. Lee, unsurprisingly, also shows an eye for what New Yorkers look like. He did an amazing job of depicting the variety of shades of the citizens of America’s most diverse city. Unlike some filmmakers, he was able to pull this off in a completely believable and unselfconcious way. It never felt as if the director was trying to [insert stereotypical black character here] or [insert stereotypical hispanic character here].
Scott is quite right in his evaluation of Lee:
The secret to Lee is that he’s an extremely gifted director who is a mediocre-to-poor (and always uneven) writer.
Inside Man is a pretty solid effort.