OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: Great set-up. Lousy follow-through.

Details: Starring Damon Wayans, Jada Pinkett Smith, Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson. Directed by Spike Lee. Rated R for strong profanity and some violence. Two hours, 15 minutes. Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Nobody gets mad on-screen like Spike Lee. His anger roils and simmers, spits and struts. When he channels his rage into sturdy material - the drama "Do The Right Thing" or the documentary "Four Little Girls" - he's unbeatable. A brazen, risk-taking filmmaker with something strong to say and the nerve to say it.

When he's on his game, Lee can disturb us better than anyone in the business.

When he's not on his game - which, alas, is the case with his new film, "Bamboozled" - he's disturbing in a different way. We're disturbed (dismayed may be a better word) by a carelessness that can, as it does here, almost eradicate a daring premise.

"Bamboozled" is about America, race, TV and the whole darn thing (did I mention he was ambitious?). Damon Wayans stars as Pierre Delacroix, the sole African-American exec at the Continental Network System. As his adopted name and affected accent suggest, Delacroix is experiencing some sort of identity crisis. However, his identity is crystal clear to his white boss, Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport). He's a black guy and, as such, is handed the job of delivering a certifiably "black" show to save the floundering network.

Ironically, Dunwitty, who's married to an African-American and has covered his office with African art and posters of African-American sports stars, considers himself more of a brother than Delacroix. He's so "down" he doesn't want something "sanitized" like "The Cosby Show." He wants something hip, something happening. Something for the homeys. If he doesn't deliver, Delacroix can consider himself a stay-at-homey unemployed TV exec.

Torn between desperation and disdain, Delacroix creates a show that he believes will rub America's collective face in so-called blackness. It's "Mantan: The New Millennium Musical." Set in a watermelon patch, it stars two former street entertainers, Manray (Savion Glover), now renamed Mantan (for Mantan Moreland), and Womack (Tommy Davidson), now called Sleep 'n' Eat (for the racially caricatured stage name adopted by Willie Best). The hideous icing on the cake? They perform in blackface.

To Delacroix's amazement, the show is a smash. And then . . . well, that's the problem. Once he gets "Mantan" on its appalling jivin' and shuckin' feet, Lee doesn't know what to do next. A love triangle erupts - truly, it seems that sudden - among Delacroix, Manray and Sloan, Delacroix's bright, hard-working, conscionable assistant (Jada Pinkett Smith). A guerilla gang of revolutionaries, led by Sloan's brother (Mos Def), takes matters into its own hands. Guns are pulled. People get killed.

Among the casualties is Lee's picture. "Bamboozled," which takes its title from a speech by Malcolm X (helpfully recycled for us via a clip from Lee's own powerful movie about the slain leader), declares its satiric intentions from the beginning. But good satire is sharp, pointed, intricately structured to best expose the fallibility and even heinousness of whatever is being skewered. "Bamboozled" is diffuse and scattershot.

And it just doesn't make sense. Who is Delacroix? A token? A cleverly disguised subversive? He's clearly chosen to distance himself from his African-American roots, yet he also wishes to sabotage the system. Further, Lee belabors his point. Not that you couldn't spend 2,000-plus hours on our nation's torturous racial history (the movie is a little over two hours), but we get it pretty quickly that "Mantan" is an excruciating travesty. Yet Lee keeps showing us excerpts long after such segments are useful (long after they've become counterproductive to the film's narrative shape).

Granted, that's partly what he's after. To rub our collective faces in the sheer ugliness of these all-singing, all-dancing, all-grinning stereotypes. But Lee overplays his hand and overestimates our patience (resilience?). "Bamboozled" is reduced to a two-hour-plus harangue - one with a righteous cause but a wrongheaded way of getting it across.

Ironically, the movie's most powerful moments come at the very end when Lee immerses us in a non-stop montage of archival footage. It's a "That's Entertainment" horror show in which we see everything from disgusting jungle bunny cartoon characters to Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on blackface before putting on a show.

"Bamboozled" offers a tremendous finale - troubling, galvanizing, inescapable. So very effective, in fact, that you can't help but wonder if "Bamboozled" might've worked better if Lee had chucked the fictional stuff and made a documentary on this same subject.

The movie's final frames say it all. The preceding ones don't say enough.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service