★ ★ ★ ½
Originally performed in 411 B.C., Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata tells the story of one woman’s efforts to end the Peloponnesian War -- by convincing the women of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until the two warring sides negotiate a cease-fire. Two and a half millennia later, divisive director Spike Lee has set his own adaptation of the ancient play in modern-day Chicago, a city torn apart by gun violence in its low-income neighborhoods.
An underground rapper with the stage moniker of Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) is the leader of the Spartan gang in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood. His violent cohorts have been engaged in a long-standing feud with rival gang the Trojans, led by the eye-patch-wearing Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). After a shooting at one of Chi’s concerts -- followed by an attempt on his life later that night -- his girlfriend Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) decides that she’s fed up with the violence in her neighborhood. She meets with an older woman named Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), who encourages Lysistrata and the Spartan women to put their foot down against their violent men. Miss Helen suggests that the women abstain from sex until the gangs lay down their guns and come to a peaceful resolution.
Meanwhile, a preteen girl is gunned down in the middle of the street in broad daylight. Her mother (Jennifer Hudson) is devastated and hysterical with grief, yet no one wants to come forward as a witness and identify the shooter, due to fears of being branded as a snitch. Tensions in the neighborhood reach a fever pitch as a local pastor (John Cusack) passionately rallies the residents of Chicago, while the abstinence pledge spreads across the country, prompting the government to get involved.
Lee has made a career out of pushing buttons, asking questions, and prodding social norms, all with varying degrees of success depending on the film. Chi-Raq isn’t nearly as polished or cohesive as his early-period works, such as She’s Gotta Have It or Do the Right Thing, but it’s delivered with a sense of fervor and immediacy that hasn’t been felt from Lee in years. It’s a laugh-out-loud lampooning of modern masculinity, as well as a painfully topical look at a society that has shunned its poor and allowed a staggering amount of black-on-black crime to occur.
The subject matter is so pressing and the dialogue is so time-specific that, in ten years or so, Chi-Raq might already seem like a relic. Samuel L. Jackson delivers a number of soliloquies directly to the audience, which helps to move the plot along. They’re fantastic reprieves, full of Jackson’s smooth-talking sense of humor, and they’re drenched in references to events from the last few years. Chi-Raq is urgent, abrasive, and unabashedly preachy. It’s also wildly uneven, overly long, and tonally confused. It’s the same directorial style that launched a thousand college theses about Spike Lee in the ’80s and ’90s.
You can deride Chi-Raq’s gimmicky idea to steep the dialogue in rhyming couplets, or the melodramatic performances from a few of the actors. You can perceive this adaptation of Lysistrata to be backwards, demeaning, or downright insulting to women of color. But neither the premise nor the execution of Chi-Raq is any more ridiculous than the fact that more than 420 individuals have been murdered in Chicago to date in 2015 -- the vast majority of them African-American and on the South Side. And this recent wave of killings is no outlier, as Chicago has long been home to a staggering murder rate. Lee mentions these statistics in the opening montage of the film, along with the wrenching figure that more American lives have been lost in the Second City since 2001 than in any of the country’s foreign wars. Call Chi-Raq what you want -- an exploitative mess, an impassioned call to arms, or a muddled somewhere in between -- but Spike Lee has people talking again, and that's when he’s at his best.