Black Panther for woke adults has hit screens, and it's....ehh, decent. There was a lot I liked and a lot I didn't.
The opening and the first act were superb. Ron Stallworth is a black man who wants to be a cop in Colorado Springs. He rises in the ranks with confidence and ease, and this setup is great. One day he stumbles upon an ad for the Ku Klux Klan and asks for enlistment. His phone conversations with none other than David Duke are hysterical.
But once the investigation gets going, the movie starts to drag. There is pretty much no consistency among the small group of Klansters. They're all written as a bunch of village idiots, and as accurate as this may be, I never got the sense that they were truly evil. The same can be said of David Duke. Topher Grace portrays him like a befuddled professor, but still a total shit dip.
Spike Lee seems to be going for a comedic tone, but if that was the case I think he could've injected way more humor into the proceedings. But it also could've been a thriller, and the scenes of "suspense" could've made the Klan seem menacing instead of a bunch of bumbleheads who don't know what they're doing.
Unfortunately, I never felt like Adam Driver's character was really in any danger. The Klan members all seemed recycled from other movies about racists, and at a certain point the police work just stopped being interesting. And this is what I was most excited to see.
On the upside, the performances are pretty great all around. The only one I didn't like was the Panther girlfriend. Her purpose is lame and only serves as a moral dilemma for the main character. We see that Ron is trying to be a different kind of black man than what his brethren would want him to be, and this SJW bitch ain't having it. I'm not sure if Lee was purposefully drawing comparisons between her idealistic brand of identity politics and that of the Klan. There's a scene where the Klan chants "White power!" and the Panthers chant "Black power!", and a few other scenes when I literally had no fucking idea what was being communicated. Lee's films can be confusing in their messages and that's what I like about them. But this time I didn't feel the stakes were high enough for the characters, as they were in Do the Right Thing.
Spike's brash use of other movies to make his statements is always refreshing, and the bookends of this movie are both fantastic. I don't mind a movie being political as long as its entertaining, and this movie sometimes manages to be both. The main problems I had were with the story. Too many scenes drag and make the movie seem much longer than it needed to be. Overall, there was more I liked about this movie than I didn't, but it was also a bit disappointing. I give it a 6/10.
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