Inside Man

Herald rating: * * *

Spike Lee and Woody Allen are New York's film-makers laureate, though they have different perspectives, which is hardly surprising given their respective skin colours.

Lee's energetic and, well, spiky films have always focused on the city's fractious race relations and he hasn't laid those concerns aside here, even though he's working for the first time on a studio project.

It's a bank heist drama whose tangled storyline is full of false leads and with a denouement that feels like a letdown rather than a twist. The first thing the robbers, led by Dalton Russell (Owen), do is dress all their hostages in the same grey overalls they are wearing. It's a neat robber's trick but it's an even smarter film-maker's one - we, like the cops, find it hard to tell the difference between perpetrator and hostage.

But, as suggested by the title and the flash-forward police interviews sprinkled throughout the action, that blurring of identity may be more than a simple tactic. By the film's end, "inside man" has many layers of meaning.

Through the action saunters Detective Keith Frazier (Washington, a Lee regular, who is, as always, a pleasure to watch). But his problems aren't just inside the bank. Its owner (Plummer) has a secret in one of the safety deposit boxes and hires a high-powered fixit woman (Foster) to get it back.

This leads to problems (not least that Plummer's 70-something character would need to be about 90 for his story to ring true) and the film never spells out the exact nature of the conspiracy it hints at with lines like Foster's "my bite is much worse than my bark".

In the end it hardly matters. It's extraordinarily slick, with an undercurrent of menace that's missing from most of the genre: we sense that there is more going on than we are ever going to understand and Lee cultivates that sense of unease.

Incidentally pleasurable are the barbed asides on the issue of race which have, if anything, become mellow and rueful with time. A Sikh complains that he is tired of being seen as an Arab. "Yeah," says the cop, thinking of the legions of turbanned taxi-drivers in New York, "But you can always get a cab, right?"

CAST: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Plummer, Chiwetel Ejiofor
DIRECTOR: Spike Lee
RUNNING TIME: 129 mins
RATING: M, contains violence and offensive language
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts from Thursday