Bamboozled

At the beginning of Bamboozled, Spike Lee's brave but bewildering parody of something or other, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a token African-American staff writer on a major TV network, intones a dictionary definition of "satire." Ominously, the definition mentions nothing about being funny. That's not so much of a problem in the first half of the film, which builds its premise with the absurdist hilarity of Mel Brooks's The Producers or Sidney Lumet's Network or Robert Downey's Putney Swope. Challenged by his obnoxious black-wanna-be boss (Michael Rapaport in a juicily self-conscious send-up of Quentin Tarantino) to "dig deep" and come up with some new program idea with soul, Delacroix opts for career suicide. He proposes a "New Millennium Minstrel Show" featuring two street buskers newly christened Mantan (Damion Glover) and Sleep `N Eat (Tommy Davidson) cavorting about in a watermelon patch accompanied by the vilest racial stereotypes in the history of American show business, then waits to be fired.

Instead, the show proves a sensation. And in the early build-up, you can see how it could be. As Delacroix pitches his ideas (Wayans affects a Sidney Poitier accent that adds an additional layer of irony -- or irritation) and presses ahead with auditions in which hopefuls perform numbers like "Smackin' My `Ho's" and "Niggers Is a Beautiful Thing," Lee seems about to redefine black comedy. Instead, he passes from satire to a melodrama that includes a revolutionary rap group and a tiresome love triangle involving Delacroix, Mantan, and Delacroix's assistant Sloan Hopkins (Jada Pinkett-Smith). Aptly titled, Bamboozled gets mad as hell, but what it doesn't want to take anymore gets lost in self-righteousness. At the Showcase Seekonk 1-10.
-- Peter Keough