Critics reviews

Despite its serious subject matter—and arguably at times in counterproductive counterpoint to the serious issues it’s trying to allude to—everything about Chi-Raq exudes exuberance: the movement of the camera; the West Side Story–style choreography of the two rival factions; the delight the actors display in tearing into their dialogue.

So rightly celebrated is Lee's 1989 movie [Do the Right Thing], and so beyond reproach the lessons his latest film didactically imparts – in brief, gun violence in the US is a scourge, especially in black communities – that there's a temptation to give it the benefit of the doubt, to overlook that it's a tone-deaf, smug, slapdash, out-of-touch, mirthless and completely misbegotten mess which gives further proof, should any be needed, that Lee has lost his bearings as an artist.

An audaciously Brechtian rereading of Lysistrata... Though little of Aristophanes survives the journey, Lee's screenplay, much of which is in rhyming couplets, wittily name-checks other figures from Greek mythology, including Demetrius, Oedipus and Cyclops (a one-eyed Wesley Snipes). This breathlessly energetic film conveys a powerful sense of anger at the waste of black lives, and deserves to be better known.

This film is many things at once: It is didactic but ambitious, affecting but satirical, absurd but also poignant. Take, for instance, Jennifer Hudson... On hands and knees she scrubs her 11-year-old's blood off of the pavement as it rises in pink, foamy bubbles. But consider also: Samuel L. Jackson as a one-man Greek chorus, breaking the film's fourth wall with rhapsodic asides and dirty jokes. With a frenetic and unpredictable pace Chi-Raq clasps tragedy and comedy hand in hand.

At a historical moment that requires more hard truths than soothing delusions, Chi-Raq and its author seem like preening tourists who—to paraphrase Gil-Scott Heron's legendary verse about NAACP director Roy Wilkins—stroll through black Chicago in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit they've been saving for just the proper occasion.

It's witty and exuberant with bonkers flair, riotously erotic, and fraught with politically charged outrage and sorrow. To put it another way: Spike Lee's take on America's problem with gun violence is many things, but never boring.

Chi-Raq, Lee's most daring film since Bamboozled, is a liberal message movie staged as a fusion of graphic novel, music video, musical, action film, meathead comedy, August Wilson play, and chamber sex drama—all under the umbrella of contemporizing Aristophanes's Lysistrata, an ancient Greek comedy that pivots on women withholding sex from men in an attempt to instill peace in their land.

The film grows more ridiculous by the minute. Angrier, too. This is an impulse familiar to the work and style of Spike Lee... It's an impulse that has, does, and always will piss off as many people as it moves and intrigues. Chi-Raq is no different, even if the immediacy of what's at stake seems to demand sobriety... The wonder of Chi-Raq, what makes it a remarkable film, is that it succeeds in giving us something both askew from these demands and, crucially, in excess of them.

How can art depict and respond to the crisis, reflect the monstrous societal forces that render many black lives unlivable or simply unlived, and yet be—as art—free, personal, intimate, and beautiful? Amazingly, Lee creates such a work of art, not by tamping down his style, suppressing his personal impulses, or subordinating his intuitions to principles, but by heightening and extending his style.

Chi-Raq's fantastical aesthetic quotations and raucous jokes very often live only for the moment, superseding any aim beyond stylistic excess, such as when a Spartan hops on a pole and starts dancing because all the strippers have gone home. However, there are other moments that are complex in their style and subtext, but still feel retain a degree of comedy.

Chi-Raq brings all of Lee's best qualities to the fore. It's messy in places, as Lee's movies tend to be. But there isn't a moment that Chi-Raq isn't alive. This is a deeply serious, biting picture that also has joy in its heart.

Lee's musical/satire/feature-length editorial lurches from genre to genre and tone to tone with as much freewheeling spontaneity as possible for a film where the dialogue is almost entirely in verse. It's a teeming repository of idea—by turns somber and profane, whimsical and hectoring, inspired and inexplicable.