Inside Man is Spike Lee's sidestep, a big-name-starring, easily accessible film about a bank heist, a popular standby movie plot. At first, one might wonder if Lee is temporarily courting the mainstream -- has he gone the route of Steven Soderbergh, deftly wooing the public with caper flicks to hold himself over until his next, more "artistic" project gets under way? As it turns out, Lee can't help himself -- Inside Man is still socio-politically angry, nearly as much as the other statement works for which he is known.

This doesn't imply that Lee handles the genre elements poorly; quite the opposite. The movie starts out with full confidence in holding the audience's attention. Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) begins by telling us he's devised the perfect bank robbery, and on an ordinary afternoon he and his small team walk in to a New York branch and proceed to hold about 50 people hostage. Enter Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), who maps out the negotiations strategies. Both men are smart, naturally -- suspense, as we've come to expect, evolves from watching and wondering who's outguessing who.

Within this framework Lee colors his story to create a reflection of the current jangled New York state of mind. The hostages in the bank are a deliberately multi-cultural cross-section of the populace. Through a clever device of flash-forwards, Det. Frazier and his partner Det. Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) interview each of them, and their reactions, in both the questioning scenes and the regular scenes during the crisis, reveal a weariness of their own hyper-awareness of the dangerous world they live in, a world where both terrorists and the authorities create a sense of perpetual bullying. If they aren't being threatened by hostile criminals, they're being profiled for suspicion by the police; in the process, their identities and good consciences are endangered. People are in a defensive state of fear first, but if the many varied sarcastic replies of the New Yorkers are any indication, people are also sick of being in that particular state. 

Lee also attempts to contrast this approach with targets more deserving of wrath and scrutiny, namely the privileged who may harbor shady pasts, in a subplot involving characters played by Christopher Plummer and a lean, mean Jodie Foster -- the point being that the most culpable aren't easily detected by profiling and can comfortably hide behind curtains of affluence and influence. It is in working this angle that Lee's familiar heavy-handedness threatens to loom, to the point where the film veers in its narrative trajectory and the ending suffers from not being as exciting and virtuosic as the beginning and middle. The movie's surprisingly involving pace does not end with a sensational bang but strives for a bang to the social conscience.

Even the end credits carry the movie's themes -- each speaking-part member of the diverse cast is given a picture credit (a short clip of a face-shot scene along with his/her name), as if to enforce the idea that each of these people has a unique identity, and shouldn't be pegged as merely a representative of a type or class of person. An assured work that hits most of the right notes, Inside Man updates a genre piece with post 9/11 urgency and the beating drum of the admirable persistence of earthbound men and women who endure psychological assault as part of their daily lives.

(Released by Universal Pictures and rated "R" for language and some violent images.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com.