I have to join the dissenting side. "Spook" starts out like a satire of early-70s race relations, with all sorts of possibilities as the protagonist becomes the first black CIA agent. The first half-hour or so is great, funny, different. It had me thinking that "Spook" was going to turn into a kind of Watermelon Man Joins the CIA. There are all sorts of interesting ways the story could've developed from this wonderful set-up, but the writers lose heart and fall back on a very typical blaxploitation plot. For the last hour the movie trudges sluggishly through a bog of genre clichés and stereotypes, to a most unexciting and unsatisfying climax. It has its moments--the blackface-on-a-bicycle scene is very funny--but they're lost in all the so-so usual business you can find in most any other blaxploitation flick. "Spook" is probably the best *title* for a blaxploitation movie ever, but its cult reputation as "the greatest blaxploitation film ever" is highly exaggerated. It's good, but it coulda been so much better if it had been more adventurous and playful. Too bad Melvin Van Peebles didn't direct it. He woulda kicked it up a few hundred notches.
Review of The Spook Who Sat by the Door
