BLACK DYNAMITE

New film sends up '70s `blaxploitation' classics

January 22, 2009

by Peter Howell

PARK CITY, Utah–Can you dig it?

On the day when the U.S. made history by inaugurating its first African-American president, it was a surreal experience at the Sundance Film Festival to watch Black Dynamite, a movie that gleefully rocks every black stereotype imaginable.

That's the whole point of it. Black Dynamite, which sold for $2 million (U.S.) to Sony Pictures following its huge reception here and which is due in theatres this summer, is in its own perverse way every bit as empowering as Barack Obama's rise to glory. A sequel is already planned.

Directed by Scott Sanders, it lovingly riffs on the "blaxploitation" movie genre of the 1970s; low-budget actioners where black anti-heroes with names like John Shaft and Foxy Brown busted crime in the ghetto, all while flipping the bird to "whitey" and "The Man."

It's more than just a straight send-up. No one winks at the camera, except in one scene when a boom mike strays into the picture.

Black Dynamite is a celebration of how much fun blaxploitation movies were, just as Austin Powers makes light of James Bond. You have to feel good about yourself if you're willing to mock yourself.

It opens with a fake ad for malt liquor called Anaconda ("When you pop the top, the panties drop") and goes on to bust every pimp-strolling move you've ever seen.

The title figure actually goes by the name Black Dynamite, played with fearsome authority and expert comic timing by Michael Jai White, who is also the co-screenwriter with Sanders and Byron Minns.

Black Dynamite, former CIA agent, is a complicated man no one understands – except every woman he casts his soulful eyes upon.

BD carries a gun longer than Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, and that's not all he's packing. He can make sweet love to three women at once and do martial arts moves that impress even Fiendish Dr. Wu (Roger Yuan), one of many villains he crosses.

He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake, but that's life, brotha: "Sometimes to do the right thing, you've got to do the ugly thing."

BD is on the trail of the suckas who killed his younger brother. He also uncovers a plot to shrink the genitals of black men, to make them feel subservient to the white man once again. But that's never gonna happen in the era of Obama and Black Dynamite, is it? Damn right.