Terence Blanchard again provides Lee with a heartbreaking score, and Matthew Libatique’s visuals pop. But the film stands on its own.īacking up Parris and the surprisingly good Cannon are John Cusack as a liberal preacher and Angela Bassett as a veteran protestor. The gangbangers must lay down their weapons, or never get laid.įor all its copious, sometimes clumsy comedy, “Chi-Raq,” like Lee’s best films, is fueled by urgency, sadly echoed by last month’s gang murder of a 9-year-old Chicago boy. To end the bloodshed, Chi-Raq’s girlfriend Lysistrata (mesmerizing Teyonah Parris) urges women in the ’hood - from booty-calls to wives to working girls - to abstain from sex until peace prevails. That’s also the pseudonym of Demetrius (Nick Cannon) whose gang war with Cyclops (Wesley Snipes) results in the death of an 11-year-old girl.
Parrish Lewis, Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios Jackson is nattily dressed narrator Dolmedes leading us through Chicago’s deadly South Side.Īt the start, we’re informed that more Americans have been killed in Chicago over the last 15 years than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, earning it the nickname “Chi-Raq.” Teyonah Parris and John Cusack. That befits its source, Aristophanes’ classic Greek sex-and-war satire “Lysistrata.” Here, Samuel L.
Now, in the maiden feature for Amazon Studios, he adds poetry, beginning with the spoken-word verse that fills the movie. Spike Lee calls on the ancient past to address modern tragedy in the messy but momentous “Chi-Raq,” the Brooklyn filmmaker’s most provocative film since “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever.”
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