NOTE: One of the many things I want to use this Blog for is to review films that fall outside the usual remit of EOFFTV. I get sent lots of non-genre review discs or just stumble across interesting films that fall outside the worlds of horror, science fiction, fantasy and animation that I'd like to tell you about and here seems to be the most logical place to do it
Back in a previous life [only a decade ago, but it really does seem like a lifetime], I finished my degree in Psychology and continued to study the one area that had interested me, and which had got me into the subject in the first place - forensic psychology. At around the same time, cinema and TV also became fascinated with the subject, thanks mainly to the successes of The Silence of the Lambs [1991] and TV's Cracker [1993 - 1996]. Before we knew it, our screens were awash with intense young psychologists using almost supernatural powers that Sherlock Holmes would have sold his violin-playing arm for to solve baffling and horrific crimes.
Rather less well represented on screen was a related discipline, what was then known as hostage negotiation and more recently became known as crisis negotiation or hostage / barricade negotiation. Hostage negotiators seemed less sexy than forensic psychologists - back then still known as offender profilers - probably because the perpetrators of the crimes they were investigating failed to capture the public imagination in the same way as serial killers and mass murderers. Bank robbers, deranged spouses and other hostage takers just don't have the dark, sinister quality of the urban myth about them that serial killers have. Chances are you won't be in a bank when a robbery takes place - but if the movies are to be believed, there's a knife wielding sexual pervert lurking around ever corner.
Keoni Waxman's The Hostage Negotiator [2001] was pretty self-explanatory, with Gail O'Grady in the title role, but hardly anyone noticed that one. Florent Emilio Siri's Hostage cast Bruce Willis in the negotiator role and it was OK if not exactly earth-shattering. It's main problem was that it lacked the vital ingredient that any good hostage / siege film needs - tension - and promptly failed to make negotiators sexy. Even The X Files had tried it in 1994 in the Season Two episode Duane Barry and made a pretty good job of it, with David Duchovny's Fox Mulder stepping in to try to diffuse a potentially deadly situation
But hostage negotiators have remained the nearly-men of screen law enforcement heroes. Until now, perhaps. Enter Spike Lee and his cracking Inside Man [2006] which ticks all the boxes one would expect of a decent hostage negotiator movie - a charismatic leading man [Denzel Washington, excellent as ever], a ruthless antagonist [in this case a gang of heavily armed bank robbers led by Clive Owen], a fiendishly complicated situation [you'll need to pay close attention to what's going on to get the most from the excellent ending] and a complete lack on anything even remotely resembling predictability. Add to this an outstanding cast [Washington and Owen are joined by Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor and the always brilliant Christopher Plummer] and you've got the makings of the perfect negotiation movie, the one that will do for that particular role what The Silence of the Lambs did for profilers.
To talk too much about the plot would be to do the film a grave disservice - the story snakes and twists through a series of entirely unpredictable but always believable and gripping complications that it's best to enjoy at first hand with as little prior knowledge as possible. Suffice to say that it avoids the trap of simply having its hero [excellently played, as ever, by Washington] stand around talking to his antagonist and instead weaves a complex set of stories that rely on hidden agendas, twisted motivations and surprise reveals to keep us guessing.
This is a pretty atypical Spike Lee movie, but he does an amazing job with it, keeping the mystery of a safe deposit box and why it's so important to the bank's owner going brilliantly in the background while equally keeping us guessing as to what the bank robbers are really up to. The tense telephone negotiation scenes, with Washington and Owen playing an electrifying game of psychological cat and mouse together, are, along with Washington's interrogations of the hostages, seen in flash-forwards throughout the film, the highlights of the film. Lee, always an intelligent film-maker - no matter what you make thing of his films, they're always thoughtful and refuse to play to the usual Hollywood clichés - turns Russell Gerwitz's clever script for Inside Man into a most unusual thriller that ditches many of the genre's chestnuts in favour of fresh and original ideas.
What Inside Man portrays best is the frustration, the tension, the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants nature of hostage negotiation. Although negotiators are all highly trained - their techniques were first developed by the New York City Police Department as far back as the mid-70s and have been refined and developed by agencies across the world since - there's still a major element of unpredictability involved. Where profilers tend to work well away from the men or women they're trying to bring to justice, negotiators have to deal with them live, often face-to-face, in highly fluid situations that require the steeliest of nerves. Negotiators need to think on their feet as tense states of affair shift constantly and all the while, they have to continue with the day-to-day, much more routine police work. Inside Man portrays all this brilliantly, alongside the more routine but no less fascination - and frustrating - aspects of police procedure.
The well-deserved success of Inside Man will likely inspire a clutch of similar, and probably inferior, similar efforts, much like the success of The Silence of the Lambs revived the ailing slasher genre in the 90s. If any of them can match the compelling, keep-'em-guessing unpredictability of Inside Man, we should be in for a treat.
Click here to win a copy of Inside Man on DVD.Reviews_,
