“Red Hook Summer” is the new film from Spike Lee and one that quite a lot of people might be looking forward to since it returns the filmmaker to his Brooklyn roots and even has a cameo by Spike himself, playing his old Do the Right Thing character and still delivering pizzas. Those that might be looking forward to this movie really shouldn’t be. To say it doesn’t deserve its jaw-droppingly positive Rotten Tomatoes grade of “Fresh” is an understatement. To call it “awful,” isn’t.
The movie is about a bored Atlanta teenager spending the summer with his preacher grandfather (The Wire’s poor Clarke Peters, finally getting a lead role but not in the way The Wire fans might want) in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn. The problem is that that’s as close to a “plot” as the movie gets, and we become just as bored as the teenager we’re watching until the movie’s horrifying twist about 90 percent into the movie. At that point, we’re no longer bored but we are downright mystified at everything that’s happened beforehand.
What Works: Peters is a great actor. I don’t believe that this is a great performance, but I think it’s important to call out proper talent. The best performance in the entire movie may come, surprisingly, from Red Tails’s Nate Parker, playing a local hoodlum with the kind of zest the rest of the movie is missing until the very end, when it’s too much too late.
What Doesn’t Work: More or less everything. The real problem is that the first 9/10ths of this movie are like an ultra-indie Tyler Perry movie. You’re practically being held hostage by Peters’s blowhard preacher who can’t stop sermonizing for even a second. His character hates hip hop, television, technology, going on dates, the culture of today in general, gentrification, and pretty much everything except Jesus. This is a man who thinks there’s literally nothing in this life for him except Jesus, which makes him very much boring until we find out there’s a horrible secret he’s running from. And at that point we have to call into question everything that’s come before us in the movie, and ask “What exactly is Lee saying? Why is he going from Jesus-and-biscuits conservatism to wild melodrama in the blink of an eye?” [Also not unlike a Tyler Perry movie, come to think of it.] The answer is that for all the surface talk of Lee getting drunk on his own voice, he may not actually be saying anything, just an old man bitching about everything around him.
What I Would Have Done Differently:Uhhh…See above. Some movies aren’t redeemable with a few minor tweaks. Some movies are born bad, bad ideas followed by bad execution, worse editing, and terrible judgment. I believe this to be one of those movies.