Spike Lee, why do you dwindle? A lament, in the form of a review of 'Sucker Free City'


From today's Oregonian:




Man, what happened to Spike Lee?

The writer-director's growing irrelevance is one of the great tragedies to follow the '80s indie-film boom. Movie-lovers will remember when Lee, working with cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, unleashed a string of fresh, ambitious, racially charged films from 1986-92-- including "She's Gotta Have It," "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X" -- that dropped on the national consciousness like atom bombs. Even flawed films like "Jungle Fever" (hell, even his hilarious Nike commercials) were fodder for magazine think pieces, with Lee raising everyone's hackles as a sound-bite provocateur. (Remember when he told kids to skip school to see "Malcolm X" back in '92?)

And then the downhill slide began in earnest.

After "Malcolm X," Dickerson ended their collaboration to become a mediocre film director. Unfortunately, so did Lee. Starting with the crazy-horrible "Crooklyn," Lee's output became erratic at best -- a mix of deliberate provocation ("Bamboozled"), dramatic tone-deafness ("She Hate Me") and moments of genuine artistry ("The 25th Hour"). While he's directed a couple of decent nonfiction pieces, he has yet to produce a single film that fires on all burners in the post-Dickerson era.

And the worst thing? Nobody cares. Here's how bad it's gotten: Lee can't even get a Showtime miniseries off the ground.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, his latest directorial effort, "Sucker Free City" -- airing Saturday, Feb. 12 as a "Showtime Original Movie" -- was commissioned by the cable network in 2003 as a series pilot. But then Showtime Entertainment president Robert Greenblatt, after considering making it a "limited-run series," settled for throwing the pilot onscreen as a stand-alone film.

Unfortunately, it fails utterly at standing alone.

There is a precedent for this sort of thing smelting cinematic gold. David Lynch managed to transform "Mulholland Dr." from a failed ABC pilot into something beautiful, strange and slightly terrifying. "Sucker Free City," unfortunately, is just another mediocre Spike Lee Joint -- only now with unresolved TV subplots. It's a shaggy, uninvolving telefilm with a strong social conscience, a preachy script, one or two credible performances and flashes of the old visual brilliance that mainly serve to remind "Do the Right Thing" fans of better days.

The worst part is that "Sucker Free City" contains the germ of a really excellent idea for a TV series. The story follows three young hoodlums -- one white, one African-American and one Chinese-American -- as they cross paths in San Francisco's less celebrated neighborhoods.

Nick (Ben Crowley) is the white kid -- an entry-level office worker, part-time drug dealer and full-time dirtbag. (It's seriously impossible to like this kid: Crowley comes off like one of the New Kids on the Block trying to play "street.") He's forced to move with his hippie parents to the crime-ridden Hunter's Point neighborhood after gentrification prices them out of the Mission District.

Once there, Nick's burglarized, beaten and shot at by the local gang, the "V-Dub Mafia." But he soon finds an ally of sorts in K-Luv (Anthony Mackie) -- an African-American who wants to move away from gangbanging into the more respectable (and less violent) music-bootlegging business. But that brings K-Luv into conflict with the mafia in Chinatown, where a young, ambitious enforcer (Ken Leung) is screwing up royally between bouts of badly written trysting with the Tong leader's daughter (T.V. Carpio).

Given that this is essentially a failed pilot, none of these promising storylines are resolved. Which leaves us with Lee's filmmaking -- which is stylish and often visually stunning, but seems at a cool remove from the characters.

It's not hard to see why "Sucker Free City" didn't fly with Showtime: The characters (particularly an embarrassing John Savage as Nick's clueless dad) are prone to the didactic speechifying that plagues so many Spike Lee films. Only Mackie and Leung pull it off with any degree of skill. And the naturalistic, handheld style employed for much of the film doesn't mesh with Lee's more cartoony affectations -- such as having the characters stare accusingly at the camera, or having the V-Dubs drink from 40-ounce malt-liquor bottles literally shaped like aerial bombs. Unlike, say, "Do the Right Thing," there's no consistent style merging these over-the-top ideas with the grittier story being told.

To quote the cynical cops from Lee's greatest work of art: "What a waste."
____________________

Lee's downward spiral continues with 'Sucker Free City' (The Oregonian, Feb. 12, 2004)


Posted: Sat - February 12, 2005 at 10:33 AM        

|

©