Clive Owens plays the lead burglar. Clive Owens can Act with a capital A. You only get to glimpse that here.

Jodie Foster is startlingly effective as a high-power corporate sleaze who makes rich people's problems go away...

Obviously, Denzel is good. His smart everyman cop role is a cakewalk.

Christopher Plummer. Willem Dafoe. Need I say more?

Yes! This is a Spike Lee Joint, though the script is written by Russell Gewirtz. The cinematography of NYC is gorgeous and for better or worse Lee has one of his trademark dolly shots where it looks like the character is standing still while the world moves crazyily around him/her. Also, there is some very witty dialog about post-911 racial ideology, in NYC.

But I have a beef. Not so much with the movie, but with the responses to it. I've read critics who favorably compare _Inside Man_ to Spike Lee's recent films _25th Hour_ and _Bamboozled_. They tout this as his "most polished" work in a decade. This annoys me since those films were so much more complex, poetic, and risky than this one. I feel like most of the critics and public are always trying to put a cap on this guy, 'cause in art as in life, pushing boundaries is messy. Sometimes the push works brilliantly and other times it fails. Often it's both.

That's okay by me and I count on Lee to make a sometimes brilliant mess.

Now in my defense, I never saw that sperm bank thing he released a couple years ago... That aside, I remain an avid Spike supporter, with very few allies unless he goes mainstream as he does here.

I definately recommend _Inside Man_ as solid entertainment. It IS quite polished. But I do hope the next Joint aims to kick our collective ass!