In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), a TV interviewer asks Sonny (Al Pacino) why he’s robbing a bank. “What? I don’t know what you mean by that,” he says. “I’m robbing a bank ’cause they got money here. That’s why I’m robbing it.”
Many auteur directors—Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh, among countless others—got big breaks and found massive commercial success with their entries in the heist genre. Spike Lee’s own heist films present a stark contrast not only with the rest of his filmography, but also with the rest of the genre.
Inside Man’s (2006) reported $50 million budget is the largest of Lee’s career so far. To call it his highest-grossing film is a dramatic understatement. Inside Man’s worldwide $185 million box office returns tally more than his next three films combined, and the film accounts for more than half of his career overseas earnings. His next heist film, Da 5 Bloods (2020), cost $43 million, the third most expensive of his career. That movie came out in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and didn’t get a theatrical release. Still, it debuted at the top of Netflix’s charts and the company claimed it was watched by more than 27 million households in its first month.
Lee’s heist films are hardly exceptional for their cost and popularity. Inside Man and Da 5 Bloods stick out from the rest of Lee’s catalog—and from other directors’s outings in the same genre—because of how they weave an incisive, layered argument about war, money and power into their narrative structures. Both films feature would-be thieves targeting the spoils of lost imperial wars. Far from sanding down his political commentary to make the work more accessible, Lee elevates the heist genre’s subtextual questions about the brutality needed to acquire and maintain power, confronting and complicating these questions while maintaining the genre’s propulsion.
As Daryl Lee writes in The Heist Film: Stealing with Style, a short history of the genre, the “heist encodes in story form a particular desire to elude the oppressive aspects or limitations of contemporary mass society.” For decades, this desire was usually thwarted in the end. In Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), which precedes Daryl Lee’s focus, a group of locals tracks the bandits through the mountains and takes them out. During the genre’s nascent post-World War II years, not much changed. In both John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), the criminals who aren’t killed by security guards, their colleagues, or their own hand are apprehended by the police.
Despite their doomed endeavors, the protagonists of the heist film increasingly achieved a moral victory. The genre, Daryl Lee writes, “frequently examines the relationship between legitimate and illicit social activity and institutions and the sometimes arbitrary distinctions between them.” In that same Dog Day Afternoon TV interview scene, Sonny laments the lack of remunerative opportunities available to him. The interview abruptly ends when Sonny tries to turn things around, asking the broadcaster how much he makes a week. As the heist genre developed and the world seemed less turbulent, the crooks and their adversaries often seemed like two sides of the same coin—one need only think of the scene in Heat (1995), where thief Neal McCauley (Robert De Niro) and cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) talk over coffee about their similarities.
These filmmakers engage with the nature of economic hierarchies directly: the objects of our heroic crooks’ affections are jewels and money for jewels’ and money’s sake. They identify something valuable, devise a plan to take it, and give it a whirl. Inside Man and Da 5 Bloods are starkly different in this respect—and it’s out of this difference that Spike Lee’s expansion of the heist film’s political dimension grows.
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Inside Man kicks off in stylish fashion, with a monologue from Dalton Russell (Clive Owen):
Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself. I’ve told you my name: that’s the ‘who.’ The ’where’ could most readily be described as a prison cell. But there’s a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being in prison. The ‘what’ is easy: recently I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery. That’s also the ’when.’ As for the ’why’: beyond the obvious financial motivation, it’s exceedingly simple: because I can.
Russell promises from the start that, as the mastermind, he’s going to deliver on many of the pleasures genre fans expect. He’s after some money and he’s got an exceptional plan to get it. Exactly when and where he is remains a mystery—for the time being.
Russell’s crew takes the bank. The cops show up. So far, Lee’s playing the hits.
Then Lee cuts to Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), the bank’s founder and the chairman of its board. When he learns which branch is being robbed, his first move is to contact Madeleine White (Jodie Foster), a power-behind-the-power fixer. Case isn’t concerned about the money or the hostages. He needs White’s help to make sure that the contents of his safety deposit box are not stolen or made public. In drips throughout the movie, Lee reveals that Case made his fortune as one of many international bankers unscrupulous enough to work with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. In the numbered-but-unlisted box at his bank are documents proving his guilt, along with a Cartier ring and bags of gigantic diamonds, the confiscated property of a wealthy French Jewish family whom Case chose not to protect and eventually condemned to a concentration camp. The diamonds are the only thing Russell ultimately steals. All the bank’s money, along with the incriminating papers, are left behind for the police to find.
Da 5 Bloods is much more forthcoming about what the titular Bloods—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and Eddie (Norm Lewis)—are after. Serving in the Vietnam War, their squad is called upon to secure and protect a shipment of CIA gold meant for South Vietnamese natives fighting against the Viet Cong. Their charismatic leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), suggests that they bury it and take it for themselves when their time conscripted to war is up—but American forces napalm the area before the Bloods can go back for it. It’s not until 2020 that the location becomes visible again. They meet up in Ho Chi Minh City—sans Norman, who was killed in action—to finally complete the heist they commenced 50 years prior.
Both of Lee’s heists are zero-sum games. Thanks to the generosity of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the mask-wearing, gun-toting armed robbers can say that all the hostages should play nice because their money will be fine. When the stolen goods fall outside the FDIC’s purview, there’s usually another insurance entity to make the victims materially whole. The Thomas Crown Affair (both Norman Jewison’s 1968 original and John McTiernan’s 1999 remake) and Ocean’s 8 (2018) revolve around an insurance investigation. Those measured stakes allow other interpersonal conflicts to flourish (or falter). One need not materially injure a powerful person or institution to attempt the symbolic upsetting of society’s existing order.
Even when sticking it to some chump is essential to the plan, the motivation is most often interpersonal. Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) are both revenge plays. The casino moguls targeted by Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew are perfectly unlikable megalomaniacs, and it’s thrilling when they get what’s coming. Though the films feature a world where these types of people thrive, Soderbergh’s critique of the shadow cast by soulless corporate hegemony is mostly implicit.
Lee’s movies, on the other hand, position their protagonists as operating with a much more explicit dual purpose. It’s not just that Russell has identified a bulletproof opportunity to blackmail Case into protecting him from prosecution; rather, an integral part of his self-described “perfect bank robbery” is manipulating the investigative attention in the right direction. In conversations with other characters and voice-over monologues, Russell speaks about comeuppance in an almost religious register: “All lies, all evil deeds, they stink. You can cover them up for a while, but they don’t go away.”
Da 5 Bloods operates on a more earthbound but no less impactful plain. Norman, as the ideological leader of the Bloods, rejects the anti-communist propaganda the army feeds them. As they approach the crashed gold shipment, he says “Now I know why this mission was so damn important. It’s about what this war is all about.” At another point, he tells them, “War is about money. Money is about war.”
Neither Norman nor Russell is particularly subtle, but the straightforward dialogue sets the table for Lee’s explorations of the way the forces of capital bear down on his characters and their worlds. Inside Man, in deliberate fashion, illustrates how the same twisted logic that Case used to justify his collaboration with Nazi Germany decades ago persists in a contemporary New York City.
This is most clearly dramatized through Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington), Russell’s moral foil. Frazier’s reputation, at the start of the film, is hampered by department suspicion that he stole over $100,000 in confiscated money. White and the Mayor of New York City pull him aside while the bank robbery is taking place and make a straightforward offer: do what we want and your name is cleared; don’t, and your career is over.
Instead of acquiescing, Frazier says, “I don’t need you to be in my corner, Mr. Mayor. Look, I’m innocent.”
“Innocent or guilty, you’re still going down,” White replies.
When the robbery is over and it seems that nothing has been taken, Frazier is instructed to drop the case. But the circumstances stink “to high hell,” in his words, and he wants to know what Case is hiding. So he keeps digging. White intercepts him outside of a judge’s office and takes her shot at getting him to let it go. “There’s a famous saying by the Baron de Rothschild: ‘When there’s blood on the streets, buy property.’ I think Mr. Case really took that sentiment to heart. But he is no different than half the Fortune 500. Let it go, Detective. You’re a good cop. This city needs you.” Frazier gets up and walks away.
Their conversations throughout the film run on parallel tracks. White speaks only in the language of favor-trading and opportunism; Frazier understands that this is how power works, but refuses the premise. Washington’s spectacular performance—steady, confident, and focused—is the basis for the film’s sliver of optimism. Frazier won’t be transforming the city or the NYPD, but he won’t let them transform him either. That he remains unwavering also underlines the truth that Case, White, the Mayor, and his police superiors prefer to ignore: they’re making choices and they’re responsible for them. Or, as Frazier says when he refers White to the Office of War Crimes Issues: “When there’s blood on the streets, somebody’s gotta go to jail.”
So, who’s gotta go to jail? Inside Man’s unique positioning of the ostensible victim as the perpetrator narratively aligns Case with the Bloods. Of course, the differences between Case and the Bloods are illuminating. Case saw a massive opportunity and actively chose collaboration with Nazi Germany. The Bloods were not given a choice, legally conscripted to the front line of an imperial war. Case had no issue extracting his profits and leading a prosperous life. The Bloods have to wait decades, and when they finally get the chance, their best case scenario requires reliving their most traumatic moments. How deserving someone is of the money has an inverse relationship to how accessible the money is to them.
The similarities between Case and the Bloods are even more instructive. In an effort to stifle his guilt, Case is an avid philanthropist. Behind his desk, there’s a shelf with dozens of awards, some with a Jewish star, presented to him in recognition of his supposed generosity. Lee pans across it in a strange and chilling sequence as Case explains that his goodness is obvious and universally agreed upon. The Bloods, initially, have a similar vision for their money. Norman, when he first suggests stealing the gold, launches into a stirring speech:
We been dying for this country from the very get, hoping one day they’d give us our rightful place. All they give us was a foot up our Black asses. Well, fuck that. I say the U.S.A. owes us. We built this bitch! … We repossess this gold for every single Black boot that never made it home. Every brother and sister stolen from Mother Africa to Jamestown, Virginia way back in 1619. We give this gold to our people. You feel that? You feel it?
In both cases, their pursuits are destined. Russell, positioning himself as the vehicle delivering Case’s punishment, says: “He tried to wash away his guilt…But inevitably, the further you run from your sins, the more exhausted you are when they catch up to you. And they do.” The Bloods, though not running from their sins, are no less exhausted or doomed by money’s provenance. Norman dies only minutes after his speech, killed by a squadmate’s erratic defensive fire. Three of the four surviving Bloods die on their 2020 journey back.
There is no moral equivalence between Case and the Bloods. Instead, their similarities demonstrate the fundamentally insidious nature of what they’re each dealing with. The toll exacted in the process of marshaling the profits of war to better ends is prohibitively high. Case, rather than undoing his wrongs or securing his legacy, irreversibly infects everything he touches. Meanwhile, the Bloods suffer near-total destruction while trying to turn money from a force for evil into a force for good.
After they’ve found the gold, while four of the original Bloods are still alive, the group gets into an argument about how to allocate the money. Eddie (Norm Lewis) is fed up with their squabbling and launches into a speech about how they’ve lost sight of what matters. Emotional, stumbling backwards, holding a gold bar over his head, he tells the Bloods that his mother always told him money was the root of all evil. Before he can finish the sentence, he steps on a landmine. Denied the grace of an immediate death, he lies on the ground in agony, blood spraying the spots on his torso where his limbs used to be. Eddie, whose share is given to a Black Lives Matter organization, is the only Blood who gives his money to the people.