BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)

Lee's latest 'joint' has been lauded as somewhat of a return to form after decades of decline since his 1980s heyday, reaching the bottom of the barrel five years ago with an awful remake of Oldboy. But in truth, the fact that the story of a black cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan in the '70s by posing as a potential recruit is a real one, is just the excuse for a heavy-handed polemic about race that you expect these days from the director.
It does keep you watching largely due to the mechanics of how the character gets away with it, by doubling up with a white cop so they play the same person, one for the phone and the other for face-to-face encounters with the virulent supremacists. Nevertheless, the fact that the duo of actors simply can't do each other's voices is a glaringly obvious problem, although this is insignificant in comparison with the sheer amount of stereotyping on show, like Tarantino with the ironic detachment extracted. All the other black characters are militants ranting about pigs and The Man, and have the same afros, while the pathetic losers in the KKK are given no dialogue besides saying 'nigger' and 'kike' a lot. Lee seems incapable of understanding how such crude reductionism works against what he's attempting to say: racism in the real world is rarely as two-tone and blatant, and far more insidious.
You want to support him for the worthiness of his mission as the film ends on the nauseating recent footage of Trump publicly courting the far right, but as a filmmaker Lee is just too scattergun when he goes off on this track.

4/10