Inside Man
| Inside Man | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Spike Lee |
| Produced by | Brian Grazer |
| Written by | Russell Gewirtz |
| Starring |
Denzel Washington Clive Owen Jodie Foster Christopher Plummer Willem Dafoe Chiwetel Ejiofor |
| Music by | Terence Blanchard |
| Cinematography | Matthew Libatique |
| Edited by | Barry Alexander Brown |
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Production
companies |
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| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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129 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $45 million |
| Box office | $184.4 million |
Inside Man is a 2006 American crime thriller film directed by Spike Lee, written by Russell Gewirtz. The film centers on an elaborate bank heist on Wall Street over a 24-hour period. It stars Denzel Washington as Detective Keith Frazier, the NYPD's hostage negotiator; Clive Owen as Dalton Russell, the mastermind who orchestrates the heist; and Jodie Foster as Madeleine White, a Manhattan power broker who becomes involved at the request of the bank's founder, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), to keep something in his own personal safe deposit box protected from the robbers. Inside Man marks the fourth film collaboration between Washington and Lee.
Gewirtz spent five years developing the film's premise before working on what became his first original screenplay. After he completed the script in 2002, Imagine Entertainment purchased it to be made by Universal Studios, with Imagine co-founder Ron Howard attached to direct. After Howard stepped down, his Imagine partner Brian Grazer began looking for a new director to helm the project, and ultimately hired Lee to do so. Principal photography began in June 2005 and concluded in August of that year; filming took place on location in New York City. Inside Man premiered in New York on March 20, 2006 before being released in North America on March 24, 2006. Upon release, the film received a generally positive critical response and was a commercial success, grossing over $184 million worldwide.
Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), seated in what appears to be a jail cell, opens the film with a prologue about having carried out the "perfect robbery". A team of masked robbers, dressed as painters who call each other by variants of the name "Steve", seize control of a Manhattan bank and take the employees and patrons hostage. They divide the hostages into groups and hold them in different rooms. Additionally, they take all of the hostages' clothes and dress everyone in jumpsuits and masks identical to those of the robbers. This way, the robbers and hostages will be indistinguishable to the police. Police surround the bank and detectives Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) and Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) take charge of the negotiations. Russell, the leader of the robbers, demands food. The police supply pizzas whose boxes include listening devices; these pick up a language which the police finally identify as Albanian. However, they discover that the conversations are just old propaganda recordings of the deceased Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha; it becomes clear that the robbers anticipated surveillance.
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