And this is coming from someone who desperately wanted it to be good - not just for personal enjoyment, but for the sake of everyone who fundamentally agrees with Lee’s underlying message and wanted to see their raw frustration with the current state of race relations in this country transmuted into art, as it was in Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015) and D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah” (2014). It’s upsettingly bad, it’s incomprehensibly bad, it’s frustratingly bad. Okay, this reviewer is going to drop the suffocating pretenses of a critic and just speak to you as an aggrieved viewer who had to sit through this smoldering dumpster fire of a movie for two (2!) whole hours on a Saturday night: “Chi-Raq” is bad. And its message is urgent, if a little tired. It’s certainly topical, taking on the scourge of gun violence in Chicago and the innocent victims it leaves in its wake. So maybe the nicest thing that can be said about Lee’s “Chi-Raq” (2015), which was just released for streaming on Amazon Prime, is that it succeeds in imparting this strong message - sort of. In some respects, his heavy-handed approach suits his body of work, which is as political and moral as it is artistic - as concerned with imparting a strong message as it is with entertaining its audiences, if not more so.
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