It seems that critics are either loving or hating Spike Lee’s new movie Chi-Raq.
In a review titled, “F**k you, Spike Lee,” The Stranger‘s film critic is not messing around. The Seattle alt-weekly’s writer loathed Lee’s film, the first for Amazon Studios, coming out this Friday.
Chi-Raq is based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, in which women refuse to have sex with men to stop a war.
“A f**king horrible film,” The Stranger writes. “This film is so bad, that even after 20 minutes of commiserating with other reviewers, even after bitching about it on my date later in the evening for another 20 minutes, I still don’t know how to pour all my hate for this film into one review.”
The Stranger critic cites several reasons why Lee’s film is a huge miss. Despite fairly superficial things that can ruin a film, like an annoying rhyming speech pattern and bad music, The Stranger writes that Chi-Raq is a “gross oversimplification of inner-city violence and its causes,” including the stereotypical, flat portraits it paints of both the gang members and the African-American women in the film.
Despite that review, many critics are giving the movie a thumbs up at this time. It’s currently rating about 76 percent on rottentomatoes.com.
Let’s take a quick look at a few other critics’ reviews from the Windy City:
The Chicago Reader (rotten): “Lee’s finished project isn’t strong enough to meet the mounting complaints against it — or say anything meaningful about the city’s murder rate that hasn’t been said better elsewhere.”
Chicago Sun-Times (fresh): “It’s a shattering, thunderous wake-up alarm, a call to lay down arms, a gutsy social satire and a highly stylized work of fiction that sometimes feels as accurate and sobering as the crime reporting you see on the front page of this newspaper.”
RogerEbert.com (fresh): “The job of a movie like this one is to stimulate arguments and hook itself into the viewer’s imagination, and ‘Chi-Raq’ accomplishes that job brilliantly.”
An op-ed in the Chicago Tribune from a physician who has worked in trauma units on the city’s violent West Side questioned the film’s take: “Lee apparently has managed to trivialize the suffering of the men, women and children of Chicago’s West and South sides and our troops in the Middle East.”
In July, we first wrote about Amazon’s foray into the silver screen. Lee’s film is the first of several on the docket. Coming soon? The Neon Demon from the director of Drive and Kristen Wiig’s Desired Moments.
Will this movie be a win for Lee and Amazon? Or a rotten tomato? We’ll see after the weekend.
Watch the Chi-Raq trailer below:
