Review of Clockers (1995) by Kevin D — 16 Jun 2010

Damn, two straight days of lame crime movies. Hopefully Kick-Ass breaks the cycle tomorrow. I hadn't seen a Spike Lee joint in a while, so I decided to check this movie out, which I actually have been waiting to see.

It turns out this movie is astonishingly boring. Very shocking coming from a movie coming from the great Spike Lee, who usually always has something provocative or shocking to say in his movies. The reason this movie was so boring is because the entire movie was a forgone conclusion.

The movie wanted the viewer to think one thing for 2 hours and then at the last second they made everything that happened before completely irrelevant. It's not like anything important or anything resembling a plot even existed in this terrible excuse of a movie.

Basically Mekhi Phifer, in his first role (he was pretty bad in this movie), is a bad kid in the hood working for a crack dealer played by the poor man's Ving Rhames, Delroy Lindo. Lindo could have been nominated for best supporting actor for his role in this movie.

He was the one good thing about this movie. Lindo was completely against crack use, yet selling crack was how he made all his money. That contradiction is pretty interesting and a movie about his character would have been awesome, but this movie had no intentions of being remotely interesting.

So two cops played by my boy Harvey Keitel, who was conventional here, and my other boy John Turturro, who is absolutely underused, think Mekhi Phifer murdered some guy and they pursue him for almost the entire movie.

Spike Lee also wanted the audience to think that Phifer committed the murder. The resulting process is something you would see on Law and Order, only the results are more predictable, if that's possible, and it's a sleep-inducing bore to watch.

Watching this movie was like watching a baseball game where your team got blown out and you knew the results ahead of time, but you're forced to watch anyways. The main point of this movie is its "message.

" Yeah, apparently crack is bad. Thank you Spike Lee. Thank you for taking 2 hours of my life in order to tell me something I already knew. Everybody knows crack is bad and watching this movie is not going to prevent a person who already sells or uses crack from continuing to do so.

If anything, this movie will cause people to stop watching your movies, Spike Lee. It'll cause people to lose confidence in both your career and the entire movie industry, for the mere fact that this piece of crap, terribly awful, boring and uneventful thing ever got made.

To make matters worse, I could not relate to the characters in this movie and I felt completely distanced from them. I was pretty rough on Spike, but he's still one of my favorite directors. I still look forward to his movies and I still want to finish watching the films in his filmography.

I just hope I never have to endure this movie again, unless it's right before I go to bed so it can put me to sleep.