Bamboozled Review

Spike Lee is not a filmmaker renowned for his subtlety, but when he’s good – with movies like "Malcolm X" and "Do The Right Thing" – he manages to entertain while also making salient political statements and comments about life in the US for African Americans. When he’s bad the films become the cinematic equivalent of having someone you don’t know come up to you at a party, pointing their finger and shouting at you drunkenly. Fortunately "Bamboozled" most definitely falls into the first category, although part of its strength as a satire comes from the fact that it deals with topics that most liberal-minded white cinemagoers may well find at least a little uncomfortable.

Damon Wayans is Pierre Delacroix, a young, Harvard-educated TV writer who totally fails to conform to the ‘street’ stereotype of urban black youth that his white boss cultivates. Faced with the opportunity of getting out of his contract if his next show flops, he comes up with an idea he is convinced is so outrageous that it cannot succeed: he revives the old minstrel show, with black actors wearing "black face", dressed as outdated stereotypes, performing sketches on a stage set of an old Southern plantation! However the show becomes a huge hit, when the media regards it as a hip funny way of tackling old stereotypes.

It is certainly shocking to see "black face" actors back on screen, and Lee succeeds in ridiculing practically every black stereotype you can think of, including the characters on stage, the aggressive Fugees style urban rappers, and Wayans' writer, the driven young black professional. He also savages the media with the white TV boss who considers himself black inside, and the liberal white TV writers who are oblivious to the irony of their team lacking any black members. However the film hardly ends happily and it makes you wonder if Lee has anything positive to add to the debate – although you could argue that his role here is to entertain first and foremost, and "Bamboozled" is certainly his most entertaining movie in a while.