Beyond just a return to form, Lee takes the mainstream buddy cop genre and reconfigures it for the zeitgeist.
Spike Lee has been making a comeback in recent years. Not that the iconic filmmaker has necessarily been away, having done plenty of independent films in the intervening periods when critics couldn’t quite make heads or tails of his work. Lee definitely doesn’t limit himself. Some years – 2008 and 2012, to be exact – Lee even released not just one but two movies, proving that he’s always got something to say.
Eventually came Chi-Raq, Lee’s modern take on the play Lysistrata, which was newsworthy not just for being a new Spike Lee joint but his first feature since Inside Man that critics actually loved. Chi-Raq can feel cobbled together thanks to the many liberties that Lee takes with the movie’s form, and its throughline of satire can be more reductive rather than illuminating, especially with regards to women’s agency and ownership over their bodies. However, what truly holds the movie together is its passion and urgency. Even as an uneven and incomplete experiment, Lee retains the ability to keep a conversation going.
Three years later, Lee finally delivers his follow-up narrative feature, BlacKkKlansman, a film teeming with potential in a similarly confronting and furious way. However, it definitely doesn’t feel as inaccessibly experimental. Watch the trailer below and you’ll find what looks to be a buddy cop comedy that just happens to have a very serious message.
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