Sunday, October 5, 2014

Black Dynamite (2009)

  My friend Candace recommended this to me a couple of years ago, saying that it changed her life.  She also started referring to everyone as a "jive turkey" around the same time. 

Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) is a bad mother-shut-yo-mouth former CIA agent.  When his brother is killed in an apparent drug-related incident, Black Dynamite comes to town with the intention of bathing the streets in blood.  An old contact from the CIA, O'Leary (Detective Fusco from Person of Interest, or if you insist on reality, Kevin Chapman), tells Black Dynamite that his brother wasn't a junkie, he was undercover trying to discover where this new strain of smack was coming from.  Black Dynamite immediately picks up the case, chasing down leads from an informant named Cream Corn (Tommy Davidson).  Bit by bit, he pulls the information together to discover a conspiracy so dastardly it could only be the work of The Man.

This movie was amazing.  It is one of the most perfect spoofs of blaxploitation films that I have ever seen.  It has everything:  intentionally cheesy music, bad exposition, deliberately horrible camera work, and the worst possible 70's caricature characters.  There's a guy who reads stage direction with his lines.  How awesome is that?!  Not to mention the amount of cameos from nearly every black actor you've ever heard of, including Arsenio Hall as head of what I can only assume was the pimp union.

I've only ever seen Michael Jai White in intense action roles previously so it was nice to see him show a little humor, especially once I got to the credits and saw that he co-wrote the screenplay.  It made me like him as an actor all the more.

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