Chi-Raq is Spike Lee’s impassioned plea for peace with justice in the inner city. The Chi-Raq of the title is Chicago, where there have been more gun deaths in the past 15 years than there have been Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined – a shocking and wholly unacceptable statistic that opens the movie.
Lee has adapted the Aristophanes play Lysistrata, where the ancient Greek women withhold sex until their men negotiate an end to war. Here, it’s the women of today’s Chicago who suspend the sexual privileges of their gang-banging boyfriends. Lee stays pretty close to the original Lysistrata, with lines sometimes in rap verse and with increasingly dapper Samuel L. Jackson as a one-man chorus who comments directly to the audience.
In a particularly inspired tactic, the men try to soften the woman’s resolve with Oh Girl by the Chi-Lites.
Lysistrata herself, the women’s ring leader, is played by Teyonah Parris, who pulls off the responsibility of being in virtually every scene. In her skanky outfits and massive Afro, Parris is unrecognizable as the controlled and restrained Sterling Cooper secretary Dawn Chambers in Mad Men.
John Cusack plays a bleeding heart priest, whose diatribe against the systems that breed violence is the weakest part of the movie (not Cusack’s fault – it’s the writing). Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Hudson and Angela Bassett are all excellent. Overall, Chi-Raq is pretty watchable.