Inside Man
October 2006 Reviewed by: Josh Barber Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

When gunmen take over a midtown Manhattan bank, they seem to be trapped inside, but the confident mastermind of the gang (Clive Owen) insists that he's going to walk, peacefully and undetained, out the front door. The lead detective (Denzel Washington) called to the scene of the robbery sees that something odd is going on but can't get the information he needs to figure out what. Meanwhile the robbers take hostages and dress them in identical uniforms. To complicate things even more, a high-class power broker (Jodie Foster) is demanding to be let inside the bank.

Inside Man is a surprisingly dark movie. I'm not sure whether this is a stylistic choice or a problem with the transfer, but when night falls on the city, the characters begin to get lost in the shadows. Other than that, the colors look good, and there are nearly no other digital errors. The scenes of flash-forward interrogation have a distorted, overexposed look that is used to set them apart.

The sound is subtle. Surrounds play up the ambience of the setting and are especially effective when things need deep and booming sound. The music comes through clearly, but there are a few spots where the dialogue gets a slight hiss. A little ADR work would probably have taken care of that.

We are given the usual subtitles in English, French and Spanish, plus one option that hasn't shown up on a lot of DVDs, but makes a lot of sense: a DVS track. DVS is Descriptive Video Service, a track where a narrator describes the action for the visually impaired. This is like closed captioning for the blind instead of the deaf. I know this type of thing has been used, though sparingly, on public television for some time. It makes perfect sense as a DVD feature.

The extras are decent, but not terribly impressive. There are five deleted scenes totaling nearly 25 minutes, and the majority of that time is given to the improvisational interrogation scenes, given in complete long-form, which were chopped up and dropped into the body of the film. We also get the full news reports seen in the background of several scenes, using real New York reporters. The deleted scenes flesh out the characters in the film and are generally interesting but definitely would have bogged down the story.

"Number 4" is a ten-minute reflection on the four films Spike Lee and Denzel Washington have worked on together and on their careers in general. "The Making of Inside Man" is a puff piece about how happy everyone is to be working on the film. Spike Lee's commentary is a solo affair, and you can tell he's in a good mood -- it's both his birthday and the day of the movie's premiere -- but he spends as much time narrating what's happening and repeating his favorite lines as he does actually discussing the film. His mood is infectious, but you won't really learn a whole lot by listening.

The test of any heist movie isn't in how clever it is the first time you see it, but in how it holds up once you know the payoff. In that regard, Inside Man, with the exception of an unnecessary subplot, passes with high marks.

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