Cliché Upon Cliché Upon Cliché

Rating: 2/10 (29 January 2019)

The sad thing about the present spate of Hollywood social commentary-infested movies is just how utterly predictable all of them are: once you know the subject matter you know the message, and once you know the message you know the movie you're going to see.
I wanted to hold back on my initial suspicions to give this film the benefit of the doubt, but there was no real reason to - it's a Spike Lee film, and there's a bunch of black people in it: you therefore know what it's going to say and how it's going to say it. You know how every black person's going to behave and you know how every white person's going to behave. And of course they do.
John David Washington can act, but his character, like all the other characters, is little more than a cartoon stereotype, this time with a wig on his head that looks like a microphone pop-shield. The 70s period detail kinda looks like a live-action Scooby-Doo, and the hysterical race war politics crammed into every human interaction with a crowbar kinda resemble something Shaggy might have come up with after too many Scooby Snacks at an Elijah Muhammad rally.
Spike Lee is not a good director, and has never BEEN a good director: he is incapable of telling, pacing and selling a believable story, and his most celebrated works are little deeper and more developed than the average rap video. The only half-entertaining movie he ever made was Inside Man, and I wish he'd go back to the drawing board and learn how to make something like that again. Something with recognizably human characters in a plausible narrative, and at least a little sprinkling of surprise.