Inside

A high-end art thief becomes trapped inside a high-tech penthouse in New York City after his heist doesn't go as planned. Locked inside with nothing but priceless works of art, he must use all his cunning to survive…

Now, this is just me talking from a place of complete ignorance, but…

While I accept the idea that the homes of the uber-wealthy do have the kind of security systems that will lock a place down if they are activated, I have a hard time believing that it wouldn’t also trigger some kind of a security response. Even if that lockdown was only the result of a malfunction of some kind--especially if it was--I just can’t believe that someone wouldn’t show up to check on the place, especially when the apartment in question holds millions of dollars worth of art. There’s no way a broken system randomly turning its atmospheric controls on and off, even running up into triple digit heat extremes, would be allowed to happen, and not just by the security company that should be monitoring the alarm either, but from the building management too. What if the sprinklers go off because of this malfunction? Wouldn’t that trigger a fire alarm? Wouldn’t the sprinklers damage the art? If left unchecked, wouldn’t that much water damage other apartments eventually? I really have trouble believing that should the alarm be triggered—locking the place down, apparently for months, all while some guy is trapped inside, wrecking havoc as he tries to get out, a guy who never actually turns off the alarm, but only breaks the speakers inside the apartment—and yet literally no one else notices?

Why would you need an alarm that only goes off inside your own house?

Shit just doesn’t work that way. Someone would come to check on it, that’s the whole point of an alarm, especially a high-tech one. What possible value does an alarm have if literally no on hears it go off? Even if the art in the apartment is a stolen collection, the kind of wealth that is implied here not only pays for top-notch round-the-clock security, it also pays for discretion, so… how could no one show up?

FOR MONTHS!

But… (big sigh) apparently this is the hook, so I guess we just try to suspend our disbelief as much as we can…

So, my initial complaint aside, the premise here is interesting. It’s a kind of reverse heist, right? The main character needs to get out of the box that he just broke into to. I like that, or at least… I’m interested.

The undeniable problem, is that nothing interesting happens.

Defoe is great. He does the classic “Willem Defoe goes nuts” thing, but otherwise, it’s a 105 minutes of nothing. No tension. No twists. No surprising reveal, or even a clever trick to finally escape. Nothing. The plot isn’t even on a clock! He’s just… in there, and can’t get out. No real rush. No pressure. I guess there isn’t much food and water, but, I don’t know… that more seems like a silly problem more than anything else. I mean, the whole issue is that he’s locked in and can’t figure out how to get OUT of a regular-ass apartment, in a regular-ass building, in regular-ass New York City, and it’s real hard to feel any tension of that.

In the end, Inside is a plodding and tedious film, with a big wet fart of a story that either ignores the obviously flaw in the plot, or isn’t smart enough to spot it, one that clearly thinks it’s saying something insightful, and just as clearly doesn’t know what that something is, and that’s just too bad.

Thumbs way down.