Boots Riley said all of this in a much more eloquent and informed manner than I ever could, but here’s the brunt of it anyway: Stan Lee is a bootlicker, and Ron Stallworth is a terrorist. This movie is filled with blatant propagandist lies: there was no bomb threat for Ron to save his damsel in distress from. The FBI never intended to dismantle white supremacist organizations; they were just infiltrating them to use as a vantage point to destroy radical black communist organizations. Stan Lee received 30k in funding from the NYPD, so really, are any of us surprised?
If you watched this half asleep, slightly drunk, and very distracted, it would be easy to consider it a good movie. It’s funny, John David Washington & Jason Pääkkönen are both fascinating to watch, and the costume design is essentially vintage-porn. The camerawork is immersive (think: burning cross scene), and there’s that iconic Spike Lee quirkiness (think: kung fu sound effects). The intro was interesting enough to convince me to finish the movie after abandoning it twice, and the scene where the KKK watches Birth of a Nation juxtaposed with the black student union assembly is infuriating; it elicits emotion, which is what movies are meant to do. The underhand comparison of Duke to Trump would make a white liberal feel very smart for picking up on it, despite the fact that it is so obviously drawn out it really takes the mental prowess of a kindergartner to match x with z.
The glorification and romanticization of pigs as national heroes is a very American method of bastardizing a movement, and in my book, absolutely unforgivable. Cops are not heroes, they are not pioneers of social change— they never have been and they never will be. They are not the dismantlers of racist cults; they ARE the racist cult. With the way the film is structured, the viewer tends to assume that the role of protagonist is interchangeable with that of the hero, and if we implied that making a centrist, reformist, there’s-good-on-both-sides cop the hero of a supposedly “historical” narrative about the foundations of the black liberation movement isn’t blatant bootlicking, we’d all be lying to ourselves.
Aside from the shameless oink oink propaganda, I do have several issues with this movie. I honestly wish they’d just made this movie about Patrice, because honestly, she was the only character with significant screen-time whose opinion I even slightly cared about. Flashing the movie posters on screen while Ron & Patrice were “bonding” felt pretentious and tacky and SO very Hollywood. It’s a little bit too easy to tell that an overwhelming amount of men were involved in the production of this movie. When Patrice gets sexually assaulted by the white police officer, Ron continues to defend the police force. When Patrice confronts him about deceiving her at the start of their relationship, he changes the topic to his own pseudo-savior sob story. When Ron finds out the black student union rally is being targeted by white supremacist terrorists, his immediate reaction is to save Patrice and ONLY Patrice, because he doesn’t care about black liberation— he cares about his job. The entire initial plotline of dismantling radical black organizations is sloppily abandoned, despite the fact that those operations accounted for the bulk of Stallworth’s true work. At one point, the propaganda borders on genuinely offensive in how stupid it assumes the viewer to be; you really expect me to believe that everyone clapped as the “bad apple” cop was rooted out, when the murderers of Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Elijah McClain, and countless others walk free?
TL;DR: If you want to watch a movie about a bunch of cops jerking each other off with cool cinematography and pretty coloring, watch this. If you want to feel genuinely informed, read the works of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Huey P. Newton, Malcom X, Fred Hampton, and countless other real, radical, revolutionary black Americans.
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