| | | "HD-DVD, The Look and Sound of Perfect."
Features: DVD, English, French, Dolby, Digital Audio, Dolby Digital (5.1)
Academy Award winner Denzel Washington, Academy Award nominee Clive Owen and Academy Award winner Jodie Foster star in this intense and explosive crime thriller. The perfect bank robbery quickly spirals into an unstable and deadly game of cat-and-mouse between a criminal mastermind (Owen), a determined detective (Washington), and a power broker with a hidden agenda (Foster). As the minutes tick by and the situation becomes increasingly tense, one wrong move could mean disaster for any one of them. From acclaimed director Spike Lee comes the edge-of-your-seat, action-packed thriller that The Wall Street Journal calls "a heist film that's right on the money."
"...unusually clever, visually captivating and unfailingly entertaining." Claudia Puig, USA Today
"A superior nail-biter." J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
"...the mood is right, the twists are new." Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
Editor's Note
His time as a director may have seen Spike Lee gently creep away from the controversial material that made his name, but he hasn't lost his eye for creating an entertaining spectacle; INSIDE MAN is a deliriously constructed crime caper designed to keep audiences guessing right up until the final moments. The plot, written by Russell Gewirtz, works from a devilishly simple premise and spins off on a number of interesting and creative tangents. Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are sent to deal with a hostage situation at a bank in lower Manhattan. Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) is a masked man holding a number of people hostage in the bank while its chairman, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), worries about a secret document he has hidden in a safety deposit box in the vaults. Madeline White (Jodie Foster) is a sassy power broker who Case hires to enter the melee in order to get his mysterious object out of the box and out of the bank. As Gewirtz gradually confounds viewers' expectations by threading neat twists and turns into the plot, Lee briefly--perhaps too briefly for hardened Spike fans--returns to the racial themes he overtly tackled in his earlier work. The director uses a number of visual tricks to keep the action humming, such as spectacular overhead shots and grainy, darkly hued posthumous interview clips with the hostages, but INSIDE MAN is essentially a fun popcorn movie executed with an intelligence usually lacking in the genre. While many of the themes--cops are racist, people in power are corrupt, the innocent are persecuted--may be hackneyed, it's testament to Lee's stature as a filmmaker that he manages to pull an engrossing and enjoyable romp from such ostensibly standard subject matter.
| Features | Audio: English Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1 Surround Sound, English Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 Surround Sound, English DVS Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo | | Audio: French Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 Surround Sound | | Deleted Scenes | | Dubbed: French | | Feature Audio Commentary With Director Spike Lee | | Featurettes: The Making Of Inside Man & Number 4 | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, French | | This Is An HD-DVD Made For HD-DVD Format Players Which Produce Higher Quality Picture & Sound |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Universal |
| Release Date: 10/23/2007 |
| Running Time: 129 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 2006 | | Catalog ID: 61030021 | | UPC: 00025193002129 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English, French Dubbed | | Available Subtitles: English, French | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 2.35:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Winner (2007) | | | Image Award, Spike Lee, Outstanding Directing in a Feature Film/Television Movie - Comedy or Drama | |
Nominee (2007) | | | Image Award, Denzel Washington, Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture |
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| | Professional Reviews | Rolling Stone
3 stars out of 4 -- "Denzel Washington energizes the movie....[He] has the kind of star quality other actors would die for: unfakeable cool." 04/06/2006 p.74New York Times
"[Lee's] most polished and satisfying work in years....[Foster delivers] her wittiest, most relaxed performance in ages..." 03/24/2006 p.E10 Uncut
4 stars out of 5 -- "While he slaloms around the plot's slippery hairpins, Lee relishes the interplay of character that pulses through Russell Gewirtz's screenplay, and a pedigree cast helps him to tweezer out the tensions and innuendos." 05/01/2006 p.146 Sight and Sound
"Lee orchestrates the high-stakes drama with a slick adrenalised urgency that wouldn't be out of place in a multiplex actioner." 05/01/2006 p.57 USA Today
"Exceptionally well written with clever twists and witty dialogue by first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, INSIDE MAN is adroitly executed by director Spike Lee." 03/24/2006 p.3E Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he first half's a gripper, twitchy and tense with plenty of nods toward modern urban anxieties..." 08/01/2006 p.102 Ultimate DVD
3 stars out of 5 -- "Lee has managed to assemble a fantastic cast, with everyone from relative newcomer Ejiofor, to old-hand Plummer and especially Washington, as the slyly intelligent Frazer, making an impression." 08/01/2006 p.108 Entertainment Weekly
"It's smart, twisty, and talky." -- Grade: B 08/11/2006 p.56 Uncut
4 stars out of 5 -- "With a knowing nod to Lumet's DOG DAY AFTERNOON, Spike Lee shows he can deliver a straightforward heist thriller." 09/01/2006 p.128 Chicago Sun-Times 7 of 10
Here is a thriller that's curiously reluctant to get to the payoff, and when it does, we see why: We can't accept the motive and method of the bank robbery, we can't believe in one character and can't understand another...The screenplay by Russell Gewirtz needs a few more runs through rewrite. Because the film was directed by Spike Lee, it is not without interest; Lee finds so many interesting details that don't involve the plot that we're reluctant when he gets back to business. A cameo involving a little boy and his video game is a self-contained editorial. A Sikh is accused of being an Arab terrorist, and you want to say, People! Listen up! Guy with a turban! Sikh! Not Arab! There's a nutty sequence in which the hostage-takers use a foreign language that has to be translated by a bystander's ex-wife. The performances, for that matter, are first rate; Denzel Washington is convincing even when he has little to be convincing about, and Jodie Foster is smart and tough as she decisively does more or less nothing. Well, to be fair, a little more more than less. - Roger Ebert
Variety 8 of 10
A thriller that aims to be different, "Inside Man" stirs some very tasty flavors into its familiar bank robbery/hostage crisis plot, which helps conceal the modest portion of the central ingredient, suspense. A flashy cast, clever script and vibrant showcasing of New York City as the ultimate melting pot are strong plusses for Spike Lee's most mainstream studio venture..."Dog Day Afternoon" serves as an acknowledged template here, but aside from the central bank hostage situation driven by unconventional reasons, the differences are more marked than the similarities; Sidney Lumet's film was notable for grand theatrics and the spectacle of the media/law enforcement frenzy, two aspects "Inside Man" shies away from...With Matthew Libatique behind the camera for his second consecutive picture with Lee, rough-and-ready visuals are of a piece with those of the helmer's previous pics. Terence Blanchard's score tends to the grandiose, although some Bollywood rap interludes are quite catchy. - Todd McCarthy
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