Posts Tagged 'black dynamite'

From well-known throat-puncher Michael Jai White, a combination satire/homage of and to ’70s blaxploitation.  You see, Black Dynamite (White) is super bad. And he is outta sight. But he’s oh so much more. He’s former CIA. He has a license to kill. He’s a kung fu master. He’s an orphan. His brother was shot dead by The Man. He has sexual intercourse with multiple women at a time. He’s friends with pimps.

He will need to call upon all of his skills and contacts to take on the greatest challenge of his life; squaring off with smack dealers, street thugs, shady government operatives, deranged martial artists and perpetrators of the most diabolical, genital-affecting scheme ever devised.

The question on everyone’s mind: is Black Dynamite superior to the current gold standard for blaxpoitation spoof, the fun but flawed I’m Gonna Get You Sucka? The “nuanced” answer, or, rather, cop-out, is that they’re two different movies. Sucka is a gag-a-second Naked Gun style spoof, the Wayans’ funniest endeavor before they started afflicting the Earth with Scary Movie installments.

Black Dynamite? It’s actually a pretty smart satire (the filmmakers make a point of differentiating between “satire” and “spoof” in the extras), with more daylight between the jokes than most other parodies, but when the funny hits, you’ll be laughing from the guts.

What jumps out immediately about this movie is its appearance. Black Dynamite absolutely feels like a genuine movie from the 1970s. The filmmakers chose a specific, retro film look, which gives the whole thing an authentic, grainy feel. This is the first cue of what White and director Scott Sanders are going after and why the satire tag applies; they’ve created a “believable” world where a ’70s blaxploitation film might occur. The laughs don’t come from a 21st century point of view, pointing and laughing and snickering at the goofiness of the spoofed genre, but rather all the gags are organic, springing from this alternate-time reality they’ve created.