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Sometimes I watch a movie because I want to think.  Sometimes I want to just have fun.  Inside Man was this week's pick for nonthinking.  I watched it with some close friends and I am sure that the audience affected my opinion.

Seeing Spike Lee produce a fun movie was a fresh switch from his usual heavy topics.  The only heavy moment was when a Sikh had been detained for questioning and was robbed of his turban.  He could not even focus on the line of questioning because his head was exposed.  It was interesting to me because it was akin to asking a woman to be questioned while topless, but the officers either did not understand or wanted to use the disctraction as a sort of truth serum.  As a teenager, my mom barged in on me while I showered and asked me a question.  I was so shocked that I couldn't have fibbed if I wanted to!

Back to the movie.  It was written with scenes interspersed between past events, present events, and suspect questioning.  The cutting was not innovative; it just seemed like an episode of CSI.

The reason to watch a Bonnie and Clyde movie like this is to root for the criminal.  Similar to Heat, the conflict between the head of the police force and the head of the gang was the focus of the plot.  Who is more clever? Which person has the attributes that the writer and director deem to be worthy of granting success?  Well, I liked both Clive Owen's and Denzel Washington's characters, but the mental duel was not that suspenseful to me.

There was also a sequence regarding the personal history of one character.  The was a secret document and a big reveal.  At that point, I thought, "so what?"  It was just not the huge revelation I thought it would be.  Also, some of the big dialogue scenes had no reason to occur, so the writer found clunky reasons to stick two people alone in a room.  I didn't buy the setup and in most cases the dialogue wasn't that intriguing either.

It sounds like I have a ton of reasons to indict this movie, but I enjoyed watching it.  The acting performances were all excellent.  It was different enough from the usual but still not overly heavy.

[rate 3]