Spectacularly bad!The usual UK TV faces are wheeled out to play one-dimensional characters in this TV 'cartoon' heist.One is a mild-mannered milksop who has somehow managed to find himself in charge of a money counting house. One is a warehouse man with the intelligence of a... well, a warehouse man with connections to the criminal world. The other is a security guard with a dodgy dad and a drunk mum! Yeah - the writers thought of this all by themselves!Each of them manages to make appalling decisions which lead to them banding together to make off with the biggest cash robbery in UK history.The writing is forced and unimaginative and borders on cringe-worthy in many instances... and the time-line jumps backwards and forwards in an attempt to make up for it.The real letdown, though, is it's simply unrealistic to the point of farce...Early on - 50,000 quid goes missing and the company owners laugh it off over a phone call as something they'll sort out later! The middle-aged manager and his barren wife have somehow been fast-tracked through the adoption process and take on a six-year-old girl. The security guard decides it's a good idea to shack up with a 17-year-old immigrant worker who just got fired from the money counting house! The idiot warehouse man is in a bit of money trouble early on and decides to draw up a plan of the cash-counting building and tries to sell it!Things quickly fall apart as these idiots can't get things together at all and despite planning a massive cash haul, they take it about as seriously as nicking a carton of milk at the local Tesco Express!And throughout all of this lunacy, we are subjected to the various domestic dramas of these clowns. And the women standing by these men are just horrible, too... ungrateful, money grabbing, greedy, emasculating and entitled scumbags.If the unnecessary diversions and subplots were edited out of the four- hour run-time it would have made a pretty slick 90 minute TV movie... as it is the run time is bloated with filler and is excruciatingly dragged out.But I seem to be in the minority here as ALL the other reviews submitted so far (just eight so far) have been positive! Maybe I'm just a miserable git that's impossible to please, eh?

I read all the reviews before deciding to contribute my own. Did anyone notice that this series is inspired, and in fact, an extended version of the movie The Lavender Hill Mob(1951). Steve Macintosh plays the part of Alec Guinness in this series. It's good to know that all good things that are old are not eventually forgotten. Kudos to the playwright and producer to decide to make this TV Series. Having said that, this TV adaptation does justice to the movie. In fact, it is more riveting than the movie itself. Being a TV series, it enjoys the luxury of giving time for each of the characters to develop. "Look at him. He is human. He is tempted!"I recommend both the movie as well as the TV version.

Inside Men is the kind of antihero drama that's become so trendy lately boiled down to its essentials in four hours of drama. Steve Mackinotsh gives a great performance as the central character, who doesn't so much transform from nebbish bank manager to near-sociopathic bank robber as reveal the ruthless criminal that was always hidden beneath the benign bourgeois facade -- and that might be beneath our benign bourgeois facades too.Ashley Waters, Warren Brown and Nicola Walker also give great supporting performances, and what helps them out is a script that makes their characters every bit as interesting as Mackintosh's. These characters are the starring roles in their own lives, and we get enough of these lives (in particular a very real depiction of working-class British life) to be interested in them. Inside Men occasionally uses melodrama in place of backstory (Chris's mother springs to mind), but for the most part the time spent in these worlds is rewarding.Some other narrative choices are less successful. The flash-forward structure, while striking at first, quickly becomes burdensome and removes a lot of narrative tension from the events in the past. In the last episode in particular the series seems to be unable to figure out what to do with the plot. And even though a lot about Inside Men is well-done, I always found myself wondering a bit what the point was. As I said above, this is a condensed version of a show like Breaking Bad, but condensation often takes out the flavour, and what we have is a narrative we've seen done better before.It's perhaps unfair to compare Inside Men to all previous shows with this narrative trajectory, which include some of the best TV shows ever. It's good enough to stand on its own. But in the end it comes off as just a well-executed crime story. If that sounds up your alley, give this one a shot.

Loved the first 3 and a half episodes of this. It was building up and up and up to something really good and then fizzled out with a stupid ending. It was just daft. I notice there are a few reviews where the viewers have only seen the first one or two episodes and then left a review. I would've said it was really good as well watching just the first three but the ending was very disappointing. One of those endings that left you thinking "I've just wasted 4 hours of my life" you know? What goes through the writers head I don't know. I won't actually say what happens as I'll leave that for other viewers to see. Just personally I found it disappointing and unbelievable. To go through all that worry and fear, planning and recruiting and then just to end on such a note - well - very poor indeed!