Review of BlacKkKlansman (2018) by Gerardistheway — 20 Aug 2018

Ladies and gentlemen, the reviews do not lie - director Spike Lee has crafted what is perhaps his most compelling film in well over a decade with "BlackKklansman", a movie that is as smart and funny as it is politically aware and relevant in the current heated climate.

The film does get off to a slow start, but when it does take off it does so like a rocket. The main plot - a black police officer joins the KKK and has a white coworker pretend to be him at their meetings in order to investigate and disrupt their operations - is one so ridiculous that it would require every person working on the movie to be firing on all cylinders, and Lee, the screenwriters and the talented cast pull it off without a hitch. Part of why this works as well as it does is because the lunacy of the premise is like an in-joke that the characters are in on, and watching them go back-and-forth between stone-faced seriousness when face-to-face with the Klan and outright mocking behind their backs for having fooled them so completely is thoroughly entertaining to watch. The two leads give fine performances - Adam Driver's was my personal favorite between him and John David Washington, because he does a lot to explore the moral grey zone of a Jewish cop going undercover and spouting hatred left and right and is thus ten times more compelling here than in either of the more recent "Star Wars" movies - and the movie proves it has more on its mind than a zany premise and some comic hijinks, with juxtaposed images of young black college students and ordinary-looking white people chanting "Black/White Power", respectively, bringing up some interesting comparisons and contrasts while the side plot of Washington's character dating the president of the Black Student Union at the local college allows for thought-provoking conversations between the two on whether black people can try to fix the system from within by gaining access to it or it should be torn down for being too far gone to save.

The movie does get a bit heavy-handed in some places, the insane amounts of racist rhetoric are to be taken with caution if you react strongly to that sort of thing, and as mentioned before the first 20-30 minutes are a bit of a drag, but on the whole this is a compelling and insightful film from one of our most overtly political filmmakers working today. Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, you owe it to yourself to get out and see this movie - it may not change anyone's opinion, but it'll certainly provoke some thought at the very least.