Formerly a maker of bad, but at least angry, movies, Spike Lee now seems to be trying to be the world’s oldest student filmmaker. Take out the rookie mistakes from “Red Hook Summer,” and there’d be nothing left.
Set in a working-class corner of contemporary Brooklyn, this drippy, interminable, largely plot-free exercise begins with a snooty prep-school student from Atlanta, Flik (Jules Brown), being dropped off at a dismal housing project for the summer to stay with his grandfather (Clarke Peters, wearing a heart-shaped mass of hair reminiscent of Gary Oldman’s Dracula). There’s a sassy girl named Chazz (Toni Lysaith), a threatening gangsta type (Nate Parker) and a crazy drunk (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), all of whom get long scenes in which nothing happens. The boy and the girl trade witless barbs like, “You know, Flik, you put the capital R in retard.”
Oh, and there’s a pizza-delivery guy, now known by the title “Mr. Mookie.” Mookie, played by Lee, is still working for Sal’s, apparently. He pops up to do nothing. Lee also has several characters say “Do the right thing” at various points. He was always self-indulgent, but now that he’s a graying, spent nostalgist with no ideas other than self-quotation, the vanity grows pathetic.
Lee doesn’t give us much of a reason for Flik to be in Red Hook except that the filmmaker wants to do yet another look at buppies vs. homies (Lee has always been the former but hates himself for it). The lad is an empty vessel who, apart from mild complaining, has little to do except observe and take videos through his iPad. His new friend Chazz is vaguely obnoxious without being intriguing, and the grandfather, Enoch, a bombastic Baptist preacher, delivers crashingly dull, stem-winding sermons from which Lee is unable to cut away. (Another rookie mistake: Scenes should start late and finish early).
So “Red Hook Summer” is a saga about the whiny and dull (the boy), the shouty and dull (the girl) and the preachy and dull (the grandfather). Eventually there is a surprise revelation and an unearned, specious, just-throwing-stuff-in-there parody of the passion of Christ in which a tambourine substitutes for a crown of thorns. It’s all backed by an overbearing and sentimental score.
The title of “worst Spike Lee movie ever” is one for which there is much competition, but “Red Hook Summer” makes a plausible contender. Such a baggy and shapeless waste of celluloid could have been made only by a filmmaker unable to resist his worst impulses.