Solid film, very enjoyable.

Rating: 8/10 (27 August 2018)

There is a lot to really like about this film. The casting is spot on, with Driver, Washington and Grace all turning in great performances. The story unfolds, for the most part, in an interesting way (eg Ron dismissing Birth of a Nation as "just a film", then witnessing first hand how the white supremacists reacted to watching it). The 'organisation' were displayed (apart from two of the characters) as obviously non-stupid and politically minded. The black power speech was shot in an interesting way (a la Metropolis), and we even got a signature Spike Lee dolly shot near the end which I had been hoping for the entire way through.
However, a couple of moments I just couldn't help feeling let the film down. Driver hitting the targets in shooting practice and Felix noticing he was a good shooter, whilst he had already shot at and missed the car was stuck in there for pacing and to raise the tension. Felix should probably have taken more action when he was told Driver was actually a cop called Zimmerman. His character in particular seemed to flip between astute and plain stupid.
The racist cop was too cliche for me, too. It would have been nice to show the racism in the police force at a more institutional level, rather than opting for just one individual to be the scapegoat, and he made some poor character decisions. I wouldn't have thought even the stupidest racist would have been as overtly aggressive to Ron in front of their own police chief.
I thought the relationship between the President of the student union and Ron was barely developed at all, and probably didn't need to be there. It could have carried even if Ron just had an adulation for her, rather than a love interest.
All minor points, though, as the film is enjoyable and is relatively successful with its message. I understand the marketing as specially a black comedy, which dragged more people into the cinema to see it expecting another Get Out or something like Black Dynamite, leaving a few people confused on here (funny that so many of the bad reviews are littered with spelling mistakes... Alec Baldwin's character much?).
The film ends in a powerful way. A few people have called it cheap, but when the message is this important it's important that we don't leave the theatre celebrating anything. The real Ron Stalworth has said that racism hasn't changed one bit since the 1970s. Spike Lee does a wonderful job showing how racism began to become more subversive and structured in the 70s, and, in case you missed the 3 or 4 times during the film the characters alluded to present day Trumpisms, it's only right you end the film with Trump's language describing the neo-Nazis as "not nice", but the victims as "violent".
Very enjoyable film, carried by those three performances in particular.