BlackkKlansman

Disappointingly erratic and rarely engrossing, BlackkKlansman follows circa 1970s police officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) as he successfully manages to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan – with the movie detailing Ron’s efforts at keeping the undercover operation going alongside a helpful colleague (Adam Driver’s Flip Zimmerman). Filmmaker Spike Lee, working from a script cowritten with Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, and Kevin Willmott, makes his decidedly less-than-subtle aspirations clear right from the get-go, as BlackkKlansman opens with a prolonged sequence from Gone with the Wind and follows that with outtakes from a racist (and fake) 1950s PSA (with the latter, at least, featuring an amusing Alec Baldwin performance). From there, BlackkKlansman progresses into a slow-moving and perpetually disjointed narrative that’s ultimately much more miss than hit – with the far-from-engrossing atmosphere compounded by Lee’s oddly bland visuals and the script’s ongoing emphasis on unfunny, entirely needless instances of over-the-top humor. And while the movie remains basically watchable throughout – it doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Lee has populated the proceedings with a number of talented performers – BlackkKlansman‘s almost total absence of engrossing, stand-out sequences paves the way for a momentum-free midsection that’s exacerbated by a proliferation of eye-rollingly pointed comments on the current political landscape. It is, as such, perhaps not surprising to note that the picture culminates with a padded-out and entirely ineffective final stretch (ie there are at least half a dozen separate endings here), although there’s little doubt that the true-life footage that closes the film is ultimately BlackkKlansman‘s most effective and wrenching aspect – which finally does make one wish that Lee had just made a documentary about contemporary race relations instead.

** out of ****