Outlaw/King & BlacKkKlansman

I am in Los Angeles, and I'm trying to see as many movies as I can, which means I'm way behind on writing about the movies I've seen. Here are two 2018 movies I saw last month.

I really liked Outlaw/King. The fight sequences are great and numerous. And this violence is excellently done. (Sidebar, for me, "well done" violence means violence that the audience can't quite enjoy, violence that doesn't lie about the anguish it causes or the destruction of bodies and lives that it wreaks. I honestly didn't find Outlaw/King to be much more than an action movie set in the early 14th century, but it does that action very well, and it's a gripping, intense, and enjoyable film with a solid group of performers and an engaging plot. David Mackenzie, who directed 2016's Hell or High Water (with Pine and Ben Foster), directed the movie.

The acting in Outlaw/King is uniformly fine. Chris Pine is strangely subdued here. His usual wicked dynamism seems placed in check either by the fact that he's playing Robert the Bruce or perhaps by his lack of interest in his female co-star. It's puzzling. Florence Pugh, who was utter perfection in last year's Lady Macbeth is good here, but seems as subdued, in many ways, as Pine. Maybe this was a directorial thing? I think of all three of the main actors (the other is Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as wild-card performers who often opt for the outrageous in their work, but all of the acting in Outlaw/King is played quite straight. For me the main bright spot was Billy Howle's beautiful performance as the Prince of Wales, Edward (who would become Edward II). Howle was very good in (the boring) On Chesil Beach earlier this year, and is even better here.

Should we talk about Pine's peen? Almost all of the press surrounding Outlaw/King involved discussion of the fact that Pine has a scene in which he goes full frontal. But it's an eye-roll of a scene: a tiny moment in the movie. Don't watch the movie for Chris Pine's genitals. Watch for the action. It's great.

* * *

BlacKkKlansman is also great. I know Spike Lee can be a hit-or-miss director, and often his films don't feel produced as well as they should be, but there's no dying that Lee has a characteristic, clever, ironic style. I always enjoy his approach to movie-making, and Klansman uses this style in some beautiful ways.

Klansman is – how could it not be with its plot? – frequently good, campy fun. Lee approaches the 1970s as a time filled with racism, when law enforcement ignored the terrorist activities of the KKK and didn't bother them, but this approach is... fun. Normally I would find this kind of an attitude toward a serious issue to be annoying, but Lee never allows the stakes to evaporate. Racist bigotry is absurd, and the Klansmen in the movie are idiots whose logic makes no sense. But they're still dangerous. They still have guns. They still want Jewish and Black folks to die. Lee never lets us forget the stakes that are in operation in the 1970s.

A side note on camp. Lee sets the tone of this movie with a cameo from Isiah Whitlock, (a Lee alum – he was also in 25th Hour, Chi-Raq, She Hate Me, etc.) doing his famous bit from The Wire, in which he says sheeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit for so long it begins to sound like an aria. I screamed with laughter when this happened. This is Whitlock's only scene, but it sets the tone of BlacKkKlansman perfectly.

The acting is pretty great across the board, and Klansman may even end up with two Oscar nominations. I think my favorite performance in the movie was Ryan Eggold's, but Laura Harrier, Adam Driver, John David Washington (Denzel's son), and Topher Grace (as David Duke) are all excellent.

Where Lee really hits his film out of the park, though, is with the film's ending. I don't think it's spoiling anything to tell you that the end of BlacKkKlansman jumps forward to the racist violence during the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. There's the KKK again, doing what it's been doing since the 1970s, and... there's David Duke, speaking about "good white men" and Donald Trump in the same breath, forty years later. It's absolutely chilling, and if the movie has been funny and clever, and if we've been able to laugh derisively at the absurd racist antics of the Klan members in BlacKkKlansman, it's impossible to laugh at that same racism in 2017. It's a powerful movie.