The Big Picture

• Dalton Russell executed a perfect bank robbery with meticulous planning and attention to detail, leaving even the detectives puzzled in Inside Man.
• The heist happened not to be about money but exposing a wealthy bank owner's dark past involving Nazi ties, leading to a cover-up by a high-powered fixer.
• Russell's moral compass shines through as he leaves behind a valuable diamond ring to uphold justice, proving that money is not everything.

In the opening soliloquy of Spike Lee’s Inside Man, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) is sitting in a tiny cell of his own making, boasting about pulling off the perfect bank robbery. He hasn’t actually left the bank yet — the cell is built into a wall in the bank’s storage room — but he knows he will. Alone in the gloomy crawl space, he’s recording what amounts to a title card for the audience. Russell divulges the who, what, where, when, and why of the robbery. He insists that everything is right on track. It is.

Later in the film, even as the bank he’s robbing is surrounded by hordes of heavily armed NYPD officers, Russell tells anyone who asks how he’s going to escape from the bank. When Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) — for whom he’s gained a begrudging respect — asks him, “Why don’t you just walk out that [front] door?” he responds, “I will. I’m going to walk out that door when I’m good and ready.” He means it. He’s thought of absolutely everything, so it’s not surprising when he does ultimately stroll out of the bank, a duffel bag full of blood diamonds slung casually over his shoulder. What is surprising is how few of the questions Russell actually answered in his opening monologue. By the time he escapes, the who, what, where, when, and why of the heist have all been busted wide open, leaving in their wake a slew of further questions for Detective Frazier and viewers alike.

The Who: The Players in 'Inside Man's Game

Detective Keith Frazier needs this job to go well. After failing to make detective first grade following (false) accusations that he stole thousands from a previous crime scene, he’s counting on this opportunity to prove to precinct brass that he deserves a promotion. With his superior out of the office, Frazier is called up to negotiate Russell’s arrest and the safe release of hostages. Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), the ultra-wealthy bank owner is deeply concerned by the break-in to his flagship location. It’s the first bank he ever opened, and he keeps his deepest vulnerabilities locked within its depths. Madeline White (Jodie Foster) is a high-powered fixer for New York’s elite who brokers in backroom handshakes and blackmail. White receives a call from Case about an especially sensitive (and lucrative) opportunity. Working around Frazier, her task is to ensure that the contents of safe deposit box 392 remain in the shadows.

The What: A Victimless Heist?

When they finally enter the bank post-robbery, Frazier and crew (including Chiwetel Ejiofor and Willem Dafoe) are shocked to find no suspects (they left with the hostages), no victims (despite a staged hostage murder), no weapons (they were toys), and not a single item stolen from the bank. The vault is open, but all the loot remains in place. The police leave with nothing to go on, begging the question of what the robbers were doing there in the first place?

Shortly thereafter, Frazier finds his first clue — security deposit box 392. Bizarrely, the box isn’t accounted for in the bank’s ledgers dating all the way back to its establishment in the 1940s. Frazier figures that whatever the robbers broke in for, it probably has to do with that box, and that the box must belong to someone who’s been at the bank since its inception, leading him straight to Case. Frazier and his deputy (Ejiofor) return to the bank to search the box, in which they find some Juicy Fruit (an inside joke with Russell), an enormous diamond ring, and an accompanying note from Russell with a simple instruction: “Follow the ring.”

The Where and When: Open and Shut Case

The where and when are less about the robbery itself than the origin of Case’s diamonds. Having traded favors with the mayor and, she thinks, with Frazier (more on this in a moment), Madeline White is granted the special privilege of walking into the bank to negotiate with Russell. She offers Russell a reduced sentence and millions in hush money to ensure the contents of the box stay secret, an offer he turns down easily. Russell’s knowledge is power — he already possesses a paper trail of Case’s dealings with Nazis. As Case later admits to White, it’s how he got rich. “It was sixty years ago,” he said. “I was young and ambitious. I saw a short path to success, and I took it. I sold my soul, and I’ve been trying to buy it back ever since.” The ring belonged to Case’s old friend — a Jew who was taken to a concentration camp — someone he could have helped but didn’t because “the Nazis paid too well.”

White gains half-hearted assurances from Russell that he won’t leak what he knows about Case. In exchange, he demands (and she accepts) that if he is to someday stand trial for robbing the bank, Case’s financial might would stand behind him. Unfortunately for White and Case, she overestimated her influence. Twice, actually. White assumes she has Frazier in her pocket by promising to expunge his record of the accusations preventing his promotion. While the leverage gains her access to Russell, it can’t stop Frazier — who’s shrewd enough to record White’s corruption as a contingency — from researching the deposit box. This leads to White’s second miscalculation. No longer needing anything from Case or White after completing the robbery, Russell leaves the ring in the box for Frazier to find before he saunters out the bank’s front door.

The Why: Conscience and Cover-ups

For Case and White, the incentives for covering up the Nazi ties are clear. Case spent decades trying to cleanse his conscience, all the while gaining a vaunted status among the financial giants. Even before the advent of “cancel culture,” Case would likely have been ostracized for his fascistic origins. Meanwhile, White is worried about her own reputation. As New York’s premier fixer, a loss of this magnitude stands to tarnish her status as the go-to problem-solver for troubled aristocrats. Aside from the greed inherent in burglarizing diamonds, Russell’s motives are more righteous. Just after walking out of the bank, Russell’s teammate asks him why he left the ring behind, indicating that the initial plan wasn’t necessarily to unveil Case’s dirty laundry. The money, he says in his final voiceover, “[isn’t] worth much if you can’t face yourself in the mirror.”

The Final Scene: Denzel Washington Always Wins

With his Detective First-Grade certificate in hand, Frazier returns home to his modest apartment, where he finds his girlfriend’s brother drunk and passed out on his couch. He and his girlfriend (Cassandra Freeman) want to move to a bigger place and get engaged, but he’d been waiting for the promotion before making a move. As he reaches into his pockets to unload his belongings, he pulls out a diamond — perfectly sized for a gaudy engagement ring — that Russell slipped into his coat on his way out of the bank, capping off a romantic Robin Hood heist that, as Russell brags, was simply perfect.

Inside Man is currently available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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