I’m thinking of thrillers at the moment. Not regulation thrillers where the action purrs like the engine of a high performance car to an inevitable conclusion, but the sort where you’re not quite sure what’s going on at times, and maybe the writer or director have an agenda beyond the base requirements of the genre. Insomnia and Memento would be good examples, and the one I’ve just watched is Inside Man.

Spike Lee is a director I’ve admired without loving for some time, and Inside Man does nothing to consummate our relationship. It starts simply enough with a bank heist masterminded by Clive Owen and investigated by Denzel Washington, and adds layers of complexity as it goes. First, there’s the requisite tricksiness of the heist itself, which leads the crooks to take the bank staff and customers hostage and dress them in identical outfits. That’s interesting, but even more so is the motivation of the bad guys; just what is it they’re up to?

The fact that the cast also includes Jodie Foster tells you that the answers the audience are after probably go above and beyond the bare necessities of a thriller; that is, to thrill the audience. And Spike Lee being the director means that there’s sure to be a larger game afoot, and so it proves. We discover that the bank itself was started with Nazi booty looted from Jews, something that its founder Christopher Plummer would not like made public.

So, there’s the expected stuff around the mechanics of a heist, augmented with some neat business around the crooks bugging the cops, faking the death of a hostage, and so forth. All good fun that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And as the story develops, there is a sense of a bigger game being played. New York’s cultural melting pot is part of the fabric of the story. Racist attitudes to Denzel Washington’s character from a white cop, and to a Sikh hostage whose turban is forcibly removed and is disparagingly called an Arab, form part of a credible social world that Bruce Willis never has to navigate in the Die Hard films.

That element of politics and ethnicity becomes more important as the Nazi aspect of the story is made clear. It’s done with a fairly light touch, and Lee’s own status as an African American director comes into play. How many times have you seen two black cops work together? In almost any other situation, a black cop would be partnered with a white cop, but here Denzel’s character is paired with Chiwetel Ejiofor: it’s no accident.

Inside Man is not brilliant - I sense that the actors are sometimes bringing more to the characters than can be found in the script - but as an intelligent heist movie edging out of the mainstream it’s to be applauded. A brave failure is always more interesting than a mediocre success, and to call it a failure is to exaggerate its weaker points anyway.