Review of Bamboozled

Introduction

The first 30 seconds and last 4 minutes are the least bad: Stevie Wonder croons about the slave mentality as the New Line logo spins forward; and the ending montage of racist imagery through the ages is genuinely haunting. In between, it’s a turkey of truly titanic proportions: Damon Wayans’ Pierre Lecroix clicks on his irritating elucidated phonetics accent and states the Webster’s definitions of “satire” and “irony”. This is an IRONIC SATIRE, didn’t you know? Spike Lee’s latest is an attempt to savagely parody the racism of the American media as Wayans, a high-profile New York TV writer with a healthy dose of self-disgust, decides to re-invent minstrel shows in an attempt to get fired by his whitey home-boy boss Michael Rapaport. Naturally, the whole scheme back-fires and the show (‘Mantan’) becomes a monster hit.

Video

Yikes. ‘Chuck and Buck’ and ‘Dancer in the Dark’, both movies shot on digital camcorders, looked excellent on DVD. ‘Bamboozled’ is scraggly and washed-out, the images lacking definition, even for digital video. Let me put it this way: the ‘Making of’ looks better than the feature.

Audio

A choice of 5.1 or stereo. Okay, the sound quality is crisp enough, but music is constantly exploding through from all five channels at once, rendering the dialogue almost impossible to hear at times. A bit of a mess.

Features

About 23 minutes of not very interesting deleted scenes and alternate takes, a couple of music videos, cast/crew biogs and the theatrical trailer. The 50 minute ‘Making of’ is surprisingly good, if far too sermonizing for anyone a mite suspicious of the true gravity of this material. However it offers a lot of interesting background and intimately follows the making of the film. For ‘Summer of Sam’s commentary track, Lee was funny and self-effacing, perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s more self-righteous this time round, clearly still burned after the frosty reception the film received on its release (he even singles out one ‘Village Voice’ critic by name to berate). The commentary isn’t particularly thorough or anecdotal but his passion and seriousness are never in doubt.

Conclusion

Quite possible Lee’s most tiresome film. A misguided, ill-conceived ripoff of everything from ‘The Producers’ to ‘Network’. The digi-grunge graininess is complemented by what we can only presume is a self-consciously incompetent shooting style, with Lee radically ill-at-ease with his new format. There’s way too much movie-ish posing for the digi-cam aesthetic not to seem utterly ridiculous. His satire gravitates from limp and toothless to preachy and melancholic, with Lee constantly creating squalls of complexity he fails to resolve or even address. That, and he seems to have forgotten that satire is supposed to be, well, funny. It even gives up on the pretence of satire halfway through to hector indiscriminately before completely running aground in a mind-boggling Greek meta-tragedy in the third act.

Lee’s scattershot approach not only shreds his characters into inconsequentiality and obliterates any sense of cohesion in the narrative but also destroys his own central tenet: that stupid audiences are being duped by stupid studio executives into consuming stupid TV shows rooted in stereotypical bias and primitive racism. In this blind leading the blind scenario, everyone is pretty much as dumb as hammers, except of course Jada-Pinkett Smith, playing Lee’s in-house substitute and the sole-voice of mediated reason. Damon Wayans delivers what is quite possibly his worst performance in a post ‘In Living Colour’ career that’s full of them. Lee has never been hugely radical politically, but ‘Bamboozled’ sees him taking more than a few steps back: Wayans’ character arc amounts to little more than ‘remember your roots’ moral conservatism.

‘Bamboozled’ with its crude character sketches, infantile satire and misplaced outrage continues to further the idea that Lee doesn’t even know what racism is anymore. Lee is an often fascinating and explosive filmmaker, but ‘Bamboozled’ is in every sense a banal misfire: a structural disaster filled with imbecilic characters and a shallow, soap-boxing mentality, topping it all off with an unpleasant aftertaste. No chance. And precisely no-one’s idea of a good movie.