Inside Man (129 mins, 15 ) Directed by Spike Lee; starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Christopher Plummer
Hostel (95 mins, 18) Directed by Eli Roth; starring Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eythor Gudjonsson
The Ringer (95 mins, 12A) Directed by Barry W Blaustein; starring Johnny Knoxville, Brian Cox, Katherine Heigl
The Big White (105 mins, R15) Directed by Mark Mylod; starring Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, Woody Harrelson, Giovanni Ribisi
Romance & Cigarettes (106 mins, 15) Directed by John Turturro; starring Susan Sarandon, James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Christopher Walken
Extra-o (87 mins, nc) Directed by Santiago Loza; starring Julio Chávez, Valeria Bertuccelli, Chunchuna Villafa-e
After several messy movies, Spike Lee has made his most conventional film to date, Inside Man, a superior mainstream heist thriller starring his frequent collaborator Denzel Washington and smartly scripted by newcomer Russell Gewirtz. In the early 1970s, around the time he gave up impersonating James Bond, Sean Connery starred in The Anderson Tapes as a British master crook emerging from jail to stage a big-time robbery in Manhattan. In Inside Man Clive Owen, who many think should now be playing Bond, stars as a British master crook emerging from jail to stage a large-scale robbery in Manhattan.
Owen's target is a handsome old bank in the Wall Street area and he and his small team arrive disguised as decorators in a van bearing the witty label 'Perfect Planned Painting - We never leave until the job is done'. They take 50 hostages whom they dress in the same overalls and masks as themselves so no one can be sure who's a victim and who's a crook. This device is borrowed from Bill Murray's comedy-thriller Quick Change, and it soon transpires that Owen's criminal mastermind is as knowledgeable about heist movies as hostage negotiator Washington and his sidekick (Chiwetel Ejiofor). A clever game of psychological chess ensues as cop and crook try to outguess each other. Then the bank's -elderly founder (silkily suave -Christopher Plummer) comes on to the scene, along with a mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) who has the ear, and more, of the Mayor, and strange undercurrents develop. Washington believes that for some unfathomable reason the gang are deliberately procrastinating, giving a new meaning to the proverb 'more heist less speed'.
As usual with Lee, New York racial tensions feature significantly, the most pertinent example of which involves a Sikh employee at the bank being automatically treated as a terrorist suspect. Lee uses flash-forwards - authentic ones of Washington's interrogation of the released hostages and imaginary ones that anticipate the -possible consequences of an all-out Swat assault. But the style is much less tricksy than in his recent pictures, and Matthew Libatique's atmospheric photography is outstanding. It's a long film that held my attention throughout, and left me trying to tie up a few loose ends.
Three of the week's other four American movies are produced, but not directed, by leading independent film-makers, who appear to be helping out friends and proteges whose work they evidently approve of. The fourth looks as if it was seeking such a sponsor. First up is Hostel, Eli Roth's sequel to his low-budget backwoods horror flick Cabin Fever. It's co-produced by Quentin Tarantino, and shares his delight in severed body parts, torture chambers and movie references, one of the chief influences here being The Wicker Man. Two American students backpacking around Europe are lured to a small town outside Bratislava, which is both olde-worlde and post-industrial. Appalling things happen to them and to an Icelandic friend. The picture combines soft porn and sadism and is unlikely to do for Slovakia what The Sound of Music did for Salzburg. Behind it lies the idea that Eastern European countries are hiring out to foreign sadists the dungeons where once secret police tormented political prisoners. That grotesque euphemism 'extraordinary rendition' comes to mind.
With The Ringer, the Farrelly brothers as producers have made into a celebratory comedy what might once have been an occasion for a display of characteristic bad taste. Johnny Knoxville plays a kind-hearted nerd who has promised to find $28,000 to pay for an immigrant widower's operation. His unscrupulous uncle (Brian Cox), in hock to a bookie, encourages him to pretend to be mentally handicapped, enter the Special Olympics and put money on himself to win. In the event he becomes chums with a group of his fellow competitors, learns how smart, likeable, resourceful and underappreciated they are and undergoes a change of heart.
The cast includes 150 learning disabled people, a number of them with major credits as professional actors, and the picture is made with the active collaboration of the Special Olympics organisers, whose chairman acted as an executive producer. As usual with Knoxville, the humour is pretty broad, but the picture is funny and touching and quite rapidly sets aside any feeling that its characters are being mocked or patronised. There is a marvellous moment when Knoxville confesses his sins and an outraged priest punches him in the face through the lattice window of the confessional.
One of the other films is produced by the Coen brothers and another looks as if it had their stamp upon it. The ersatz Coen flick, The Big White, has the dramatis personae, a similar wintry setting and much the same the plot as the Coens' most popular picture, Fargo. A failing businessman in Alaska (Robin Williams) with a mentally disturbed wife tries to save his firm through an insurance scam. This brings him into conflict with a pair of comic hitmen and makes him the target of a determined detective. Giovanni Ribisi is rather good as the claims investigator, but the picture is never funny, only occasionally exciting and not very convincing. Its British director has been responsible for some good TV work (e.g. Shameless, Cold Feet, The Royle Family) as well as the dire movie Ali G Indahouse. His name, Mark Mylod, sounds to me like the answer learned counsel might give to a judge who asked him: 'And what is this second gospel to which you refer?'
The genuine Coen brothers production, Romance & Cigarettes, is a blue-collar musical starring James Gandolfini as a Brooklyn construction worker in search of the eponymous romance, who has an adulterous affair with an English redhead (Kate Winslet) to the fury of his wife (Susan Sarandon), smokes too many of the eponymous cigarettes and dies of lung cancer. It's directed by John Turturro, who apparently began writing it while playing the lead in the Coens' Barton Fink, and it employs the device that Dennis Potter used so brilliantly of having characters mime to popular songs that express or comment on the feelings they can't articulate. It's heavy-handed, though briefly enlivened by Steve Buscemi as a sexist fellow worker giving bad advice to Gandolfini, and by Christopher Walken, a fine dancer, who appeared in the film version of Potter's Pennies From Heaven. There's nothing in the picture as full of vibrant life as the wonderful opening moment of Kelly and Donen's On the Town when the hard-hat crane driver strolls to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard singing 'I feel like I'm not out of bed'.
In Santiago Loza's minimalist debut Extra-o, a passive, laconic 40-year-old surgeon who for no apparent reason has given up his job, wanders around a deserted Buenos Aires suburb, leaves his sister's home, forms an enigmatic relationship with a young pregnant documentary film-maker and visits an old flame. There's a talent here, but Loza has some way to go before he can be called Argentina's Antonioni.
