Flick #30 of CINEMONSTER's MannVanuary Trois.

My List of Films that I'll be watching (or have watched) plus links to those Reviews can be found here:
Slappy McGee's 3rd MannVanuary - 2024.

***************

A noble - but failed - attempt by Spike Lee.

Trying to adapt the Greek play "Lysistrata" by Aristophanes proves too much for Spike as his movie's tone is all over the fucking place. He should've picked a lane... because driving in the median just kills all of traffic on both sides.

When the movie goes full farcical comedy... it's pretty funny.
When the movie dips deep into fine-acting drama... it's pretty powerful.

But when combining the two... it's pretty terrible.
Gives us just a stilted piece of work that no one will enjoy.

The roots are there to have a good movie, but Spike just can't figure it out. I do like the rhyming couplets and lyrical dialogue. It plays like plainspoken rap and that fits and works for the most part. But they leave it too many times and it's jarring when they do.

Again, if they had gone one direction or the other, this might have worked for me... but, alas... swing-and-a-miss, Spike.

(...oh, and John Cusack as a priest of a black church is utterly ridiculous... I don't care that you tried to explain it away in a single line of dialogue... it's a mind-blowingly dumb casting decision...)