I’m not a big fan of Spike Lee as a director. He’s quite an interesting character and his take on politics and race are always compelling (or, at least, controversial); but as a director he’s always used camera tricks and awkward dialog in movies that seem like heavy-handed sermons. Which explains why I was so surprised by Inside Man.

Inside Man is a mostly stock crime flick in which Clive Owen plays the criminal mastermind and Denzel Washington plays the edgy hostage negotiator charged with trying to defuse a tense bank robbery. It’s an almost typical movie, really, without the preaching and with a minimum of the camera tricks that can ruin a film.

I loved it.

Overall it’s well-paced, smart, funny, and involving. The characters are, if not complex, at least reasonably well-drawn. The shots of architectural details are a nice touch that add a sense of place and visual interest, although not in a way that overtly detracts from the rest of the story. Only once—with a strange dolly shot of Washington going down the street like a mannequin—does Lee’s visual styling become an irritant.

By getting himself out of the way, Lee has directed a damned good crime flick. Not great, mind, but damned good.

The touches that he does add—the “We Will Never Forget” poster art that acts as a backdrop to a scene, the firefighter statuette next to an American flag in another scene—just add to that sense of place that Lee builds so well. For a guy like me, it also raises the question of just how much 9/11 still play in the minds of New Yorkers? But more on that in another post.

Both Owen and Washington are wonderful in this, although the bad guy really gets the best scenes and lines. In fact, one of the funniest scenes belongs to Owen and a young boy in the bank’s vault. The boy is playing a game on his PSP when Owen comes in to give him a slice of pizza. Owen takes the PSP and starts playing the game while the two are sitting on bricks of cash.

Now, the interesting part is that the game, which flashes on screen a few times, is far more violent and wanton than any of the violence in the movie. The little boy explains that the point of the game is to get paid, gestures around to the stacks of cash in the vault as if that explains everything. The audience laughs because the game—looking like a first-person clone of Grand Theft Auto—is so obviously morally bankrupt that even the bank robber sees how wrong the game is. How could this kid’s father let him play and let the kid think that the only moral value in life is in getting paid?

It doesn’t hurt that Denzel Washington is still incredibly charismatic, and, if the g-phrase is to be believed, Clive Owen is downright sexy. (As an aside: how is that he isn’t the next James Bond?) The presence that both men bring to the screen helps paper over any faults or difficulties.

Indeed, the entire moral of the movie is imperfectly summed up in that scene (and in the story’s resolution).

The pace does drag a touch during some of the subplot’s moments, and suspension of disbelief is hard to maintain during some of Jody Foster’s scenes as a sort of problem-solving businesswoman/criminal. While these plot developments are necessary to bring the story full-circle, they actually get in the way of the story’s telling.

So, in the end, it’s a damned good movie, but not quite great. Definitely one of Lee’s best, though, and hopefully an example of the kinds of things he’ll make again in the future.