Thirteen years later, Inside Man has aged far more graciously than the critical discourse around it. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis hailed Inside Man as “an effective piece of genre showmanship” from a “maddeningly unreliable” cineaste who, “ from this precision-tooled amusement, (.) may have missed his calling (.) as a studio hire ” New York Magazine’s David Edelstein savored it as a thriller by a “normally subversive director (.) that wasn’t, for a change, in my face ” and Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Rainer greeted it as a long overdue new chapter in the “overwrought and argumentative” filmography of a man who’s “a better filmmaker, if not ideologue, when he’s playing it straight.” A gritty, twists-packed thriller that self-consciously tips its hat to its illustrious Sidney Lumet-helmed ancestors (1973's Serpico and 1975's Dog Day Afternoon), the new Spike Lee Joint came to be praised for the reason that seemed to make it the least Spike Lee Joint to date. racial frictions, Lee seemed finally down to meddle with good old-fashioned entertainment for its own sake-and the rupture was welcomed as a much needed and long overdue breath of fresh air. “Predictably and tiresomely dogmatic” (as per Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek) in his polemical excursions into present-day U.S. Lo and behold, a Spike Lee joint that appeared to steer clear from the virulent polemics of earlier entries in his career, and thrived on a twists-packed script penned by first timer Russell Gewirtz, where cops concurrently fight robbers and corrupted superiors, robbers break into banks without ostensibly stealing a single dollar, and dark secrets threaten to shatter financial empires. Revisiting the overwhelmingly favorable consensus around Lee’s heist flick-and biggest commercial success to date 1-I was struck by the many voices who praised Inside Man for its alleged lack of a political agenda. “Sal’s pizzeria,” Lee comments, somewhat sarcastically, “burned down in Brooklyn, and moved to Wall Street.” I wish I could say I spotted the intertextual connection right away, but it took Lee’s DVD commentary to illuminate the link between his 2006 star-studded thriller and the family-owned Bedford-Stuyvesant restaurant that staged his 1989 Do the Right Thing. The food smuggled through the horde of cops surrounding the building is pizza, and the boxes the slices come in read: Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006) and Do the Right Thing (1989) are showing on MUBI in many countries around the world in January and February, 2019.įorty-five minutes into Spike Lee’s 2006 Inside Man, Clive Owen’s mysterious bank robber Dalton Russell negotiates with Denzel Washington’s detective Keith Frazier a food delivery for the 50 or so people he’s holding hostage inside the fictional Wall Street-headquartered Manhattan Trust Bank.
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