No peace, no pussy

The bizarro concept of a ‘President-elect Trump’ came to pass despite the wishes, clearly stated on the stump, of the entertainment-industrial complex. They all came out for Hillary — Queen Bey, the Boss, Jay-Z, J-Lo, SJP, Kimye, Madge, Meryl, Gaga, Lena D, old uncle Team Clooney and all. How the alt-right cackled when this star-spangled nobility got in-yer-faced by a basket of deplorables from the West Virginia coalfield. In the circumstances, now is maybe not a propitious moment for Spike Lee (who felt the Bern) to unleash a finger-wagging homily about America and guns.

Chi-Raq, you wouldn’t be alone in not knowing, takes its title from the alternate name lately given to Chicago in the state of ‘Killinois’. Over the same timeframe, the city’s sidewalks were strewn with nearly as many American corpses as Iraq was during the US occupation. And so it continues.

The lion’s share of the murders are black-on-black, gang-on-gang. But because street gunfights on the city’s South Side feature non-marksmen wielding SMGs like hosepipes, crossfire victims tend to include innocent children, also black. One such 13-year-old girl is gunned down towards the start of Chi-Raq, when two rival gangs are incompetently duking it out with Uzis. Her mother (Jennifer Hudson) discovers the corpse surrounded by police tape.

Among the onlookers is Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), the bootylicious girlfriend of cocksure rapper-on-the-make Demetrius ‘Chi-Raq’ Dupree (Nick Cannon). He heads up a purple-liveried gang called the Spartans, whose mortal enemies are the orange-clad Trojans run by a galumphing idiot in a glittery eyepatch called Cyclops (Lee regular Wesley Snipes).

All these names would suggest that Lee’s characters have been at class. civ. nightclasses and further bloated their egos by conferring upon themselves a pick’n’mix of mythical antecedents. In fact, Chi-Raq is a bit more targeted than that.