Very good movie, not excellent though. Bad gay content. It is upsetting that Spike Lee covers some important subjects in the movie, including issues related to more than one religion and race. The gays, screw them.
In the movie, Clive Owen is a clever bank robber, Denzel Washington is the detective in charge of the case, and Is She/Isn't She? is a powerful outsider. I'll call her JoFo. She needs to keep a big secret.
Consider this dialog. A judge: "You are a magnificent cunt."
JoFo: "Thank you."
Gotta love her anyway. As someone once said, I'll see anything with JoFo in it. She attended Yale, she must know what she's doing.
Now to our queer movie review. The cop and the bank robber start negotiating. This is early in the movie, I'm not giving anything away, don't worry.
Clive tells Denzel he'll soon be in a Jacuzzi with 6 beautiful girls named Kimberly and Amber, and sucking on pina coladas. The homophobia that ensued was predictable. Denzel warns Clive that instead of being in a Jacuzzi, Clive will be in a prison shower, and instead of girls it'll be two guys. And what Clive would be sucking on would not be pina coladas if he doesn't surrender himself. Clive gets really riled up with the comment, like that's the worst thing a man can get. Awful. Awful content.
I know rape is rape, in prison or not, and that of course no one would be interested in that, and that it would be awful and all, but you know what I'm talking about here. If Clive's character were gay, do you think the detective could have used a similar threat? Like "threat" him with two girls? Of course the comparison is far from perfect, but you get the drill.
And the favorite homophobic slur nowadays makes an appearance too. This trampy character calls someone a cocksucker. We do not see who that someone is, but probably a cop. Name calling. Nice.
There is no come back for the gays, no other mention. Just the bad stuff for us.
The religious and race issues all, I mean all, get avenged or corrected. Now, that actually makes the movie's homophobia sound even worse because if the issues were all left uncorrected, it would not be homophobia, it could actually be a positive thing to have everybody look bad. That is, if the religious group, racial groups and gays were all seen as bad in the movie, it would have been clear that the movie was trying to criticize people's attitudes towards those groups. It would be effective criticism. But, when everything else is thoroughly corrected, except homophobia, the criticism is then turned to the gays themselves. The message becomes "it is wrong to slur or pre-judge other people based on their races and religion, but it's ok to slur the gays." I am pissed off.
JoFo how could you let that happen? Out, out damn celebs!
There were two hostages that looked like they could have been boyfriends, just by their demeanor towards each other during the movie, we see them a couple of times, they are muscular chelseaboy types, so I thought something good was going to come out of there. But I was wrong, it is not at all further suggested they could have been gay. Pity.
Shame on Spike Lee. Shame on writer Russel Gerwitz.
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