Inside man starts with Clive Owen explaining the basic premise of the film. He is a master bank robber who has set in motion a plan to perform the perfect bank robbery. His reasoning is basically because he can.
The film then cuts to the robbery via some introductory credits showing a painters van picking up the gang. First off we see the bank pre robbery with various people going about their business. The action then kicks off as the gang (dressed as painters) storms the bank quickly securing the bank locking the doors and subduing the internal security.
The police quickly spot something is wrong, the bank robbers threaten to kill hostages should the coppers do anything rash and so the bank is quickly under siege.
At this point hostage negotiators Detective Keith Frazer (played by Denzel Washington) and his partner Detective Mitchell (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) are called in. Frazer has some thing hanging over him involving missing money from some drug bust which threatens to blight his career which according to him are bogus charges.
The robbers inside have all the hostages dress identically to them then proceed to shuffle them around ostensively to keep them of balance. They then communicate with the SWAT team outside (headed by Willem Dafoe) exclusively by sending out hostages with notes, initially rebuffing attempts to communicate by the hostage negotiation team.
It then becomes apparent that more is at stake than the contents of the vault the bank owner, played by Christopher Plummer, has something of great value in the bank that he cant let anyone know about so calls in Madeline White, played by Jodie Foster, a fixer of sorts to protect his interests who leverages Detective Frazer’s troubles with internal affairs to gain access to the robbers.
The film is quite tense with the three groups (robbers, police, and the fixer) all have their own agenda. With everyone trying to work out what the others are up to.
The action of the bank robbery and the police outside is interspersed with interviews by the police of the people in the bank after the hostage situation has been resolved. The back and forth from bank robbers to police to the interviews is very well handled slowly piecing what is going on and the musical direction is very good with fairly distinct sound track for inside and outside the bank with some nice musical queues to match the dialog and action. By keeping the robbers objectives a mystery and never explicitly laying their plan out, the film is a puzzle that slowly comes together and with more information earlier elements in the film make sense and you can see the overall picture.
This is a slick piece of work it keeps you guessing right up to the end and has excellent performances both from the two leads and the strong supporting cast. Clive Owen is excellent as the criminal mastermind behind the robbery cool and controlled, working all sides of the thing to his own advantage. Denzel Washington is good as the hostage negotiator who needs this bust to put himself in a better light beat the charges against him and get promoted, his dislike at being worked by the fixer and his analysis of what Owen is up to is very good.
Foster is good as the fixer, seemingly fairly morally flexible helping people not very different if not worse than Owen. She is manipulative and ruthless working to help her client but working her own advantage too. Chiwetel Ejiofor is good as Detective Mitchell Frazers partner. Christopher Plummer is good as the bank owner a desperate man. Willem Dafoe is good as the head of the swat team professional looking for a tactical approach to the bank but held back by having the negotiators there in charge. The supporting cast of hostages police and robbers are also good some good performances and memorable characters.
This is one of those films that is well worth seeing twice just to catch any little details missed on the first run through. I'd recommend it to anyone.