Bamboozled

...This isn't just bad storytelling...

...He seemed to have a preternatural gift for locating a hot button—black-on-black racism in School Daze, race war in Do the Right Thing, an interracial romance in Jungle Fever, the myriad glories of Malcolm X. Unfortunately for Lee, once he pressed the hot button, he had no idea what to do with it...

...Critics are grading on a curve...

...It starts well, with an opening half-hour that borrows liberally from several sensationally effective 1970s movies that were also set in New York City...

...Now, like his friend Al Sharpton, Spike Lee is trying to clean up his act and show he can play ball with the big boys...

...Denzel Washington takes the part played by Walter Matthau in the woefully underappreciated The Taking of Pelham One Two Three—a world-weary, seen-it-all cop who knows there's something fishy about a robbery carried out by very intelligent men who seem to have chosen to trap themselves in a situation from which there is no clear escape...

...The police response to the robbery has been lifted wholesale from Sidney Lumet's peerless Dog Day Afternoon...

...So far, so good...

...Inside Man is intended to be a crowd pleaser, but its plotting failures make it more likely that audiences will be infuriated rather than pleased with it...

...We learn early on that the bank robbers aren't after what's in the vault, but a secret stash elsewhere in the bank that nobody knows about...

...So what could possibly account for the delirious critical attention to Inside Man...

...Lee's career was also brought to a standstill by the unexpected, and heartening, way peace broke out in New York City and other urban centers as a result of the crime drop of the 1990s...

...If you're going to steal, you might as well steal from the best, and these are two of the best American movies of the past 30-odd years...

...Simple...

...The problem is that what was true about Spike Lee in 1987 is true in 2006: He was a lousy filmmaker to begin with, and he's a lousy filmmaker today...

...John Podhoretz, a columnist for the NewYOrk Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S movie critic...

...Because Inside Man was directed by the once-incendiary has-been Spike Lee, who is attempting a major career turnaround by taking this job-for-hire from Imagine Entertainment, the A-list production company responsible for Ron Howard's movies...

...Inside Man is an inconsequential jape about a bank robbery that isn't really a bank robbery...

...it's incompetent storytelling...

...The prophet of racial doom didn't have much of moment to say, and seemed to fade from view...

...Lee had a free ride for a decade, but a series of unspeakably awful movies (He Got Game, Girl 6, Bamboozled, She Hate Me) made it impossible for even the most diversity-mad critics to offer him much in the way of praise...

...Lee has always been an uncommonly amateurish director, with a taste for awkward camera shots, a tendency to drag scenes out to intolerable length, and a regrettable propensity for forcing his characters to deliver soapbox speeches that might just as well have been run off on a Gestetner machine at the concession stand, and left on the theater's seats for the audience to peruse at its leisure...

...Like the cops in the movie, Lee is only shooting rubber bullets during the painfully stilted moments when his characters confront the racial divide...

...What, then, are we to make of Inside Man's villain, who tells a confidant in one scene that he will never discuss his secret stash, and then later on turns into Basil Exposition (from the Austin Powers movies), laying out the ludicrous backstory in excruciating detail to the very same confidant...

...He throws no bombs in Inside Man (which was written not by him but by someone named Russell Gewirtz...

...Unfortunately, once the Xeroxing is finished, Inside Man has to move forward on its own, and it sputters and meanders for an hour or so before it self-destructs like a Rube Goldberg machine...

...And the big secret itself makes no sense, because there's no reason on earth the owner of the stash would have kept it around rather than simply throwing it into the Hudson River...

...During the years in which race was the foremost issue in American cultural politics, Lee proved himself a marketing genius with a special talent for commercializing controversy...

...But because Lee was the first young black film director to win an audience, the critical commentary on his work was alternately smug and terrified— an exquisite combination of patronizing condescension and wannabe hipness...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Anew thriller called Inside Man is getting the best press of any movie so far this year, which at first seems almost as absurdly implausible as the film itself...

...No matter what critics say...

...But we never get an explanation of just how it is that the robbers know about the secret stash and its location...

...All thrillers are implausible, but we are willing to accept the implausibility as long as the twists and turns make logical sense...

...The entertaining banter between the cops, which is by far the most enjoyable aspect of Inside Man, is still a pale knockoff of the hilarious scenes between Matthau and his coworkers in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three...