Honestly, I haven’t really seen too many blaxploitation movies. And that may depend on whether the original Shaft counts as one or not. Because if it doesn’t, I can’t say I have seen any of them. What I have seen are parodies of those movies, and they go way back. I am on record for saying the only Wayans Brothers movie I liked was I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and Rudy Ray Moore was making parodies of these movies back when they were new with Dolemite. Point is, I do recognize the genre’s conventions without having even seen all that much of the serious takes on the genre.
That’s a long way of saying that I opted to watch another parody with 2009’s Black Dynamite.
It’s the 1970s and Vietnam Vet/former CIA agent Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) learns his brother was killed by shady forces unknown. Black Dynamite is the sort of man who can apparently pleasure multiple women at once, and he is a one-man kung fu army, so there will be a lot of blood in the streets even as one guy is spilling all of it. Black Dynamite is a man who can shame other African American criminal types into helping him while protecting black women from hitmen as he goes looking into a case where the Man is clearly up to something that can only hurt the black community. And if I say anything more than that, well, that would just ruin a lot of fun that comes from a movie that so lovingly parodies a long dormant genre of film.
Now, as I said, I haven’t really seen too many of the “straight” versions of these movies, but I think enough of what these movies were has filtered through pop culture to allow me to recognize the genre when I see it. The colors are saturated, the martial arts is plentiful, and Black Dynamite even has his own theme song. Characters go by names like “Cream Corn” and “Tasty Freeze,” and chances are good any white person with more than two scenes is probably a villain. Black Dynamite knows the genre and knows it well. Some of the jokes are basic continuity errors, some blatant, others far more subtle like a character who has a tear running from one eye appear and disappear between shots.
And standing tall at the center of it all is the larger than life Black Dynamite, a man who gets a “license to kill” reinstated by the CIA as soon as they are sure he’s on the case. He’s a man who can sneak up on any foe without actually sneaking. He will laugh at a midlevel criminal boss’s death to end a scene and still be laughing when he enters the next one in a completely different location. White, who co-wrote the screenplay, is clearly having a good time with the role, and who can blame him? Black Dynamite walks around without a care in the world beyond stopping whatever nefarious forces are targeting his community after killing his kid brother, a man who can shrug off a gunshot and seduce the nurse on duty when he goes to the doctor to have it looked at.
I had a lot of fun with this and laughed out loud multiple times. I might have enjoyed it more if I actually had seen some of the movies that inspired it, but that wasn’t entirely necessary. Sometimes, a good parody can bring a lot of laughs without the level of familiarity for the target of parody might suggest, and this one is short enough that it doesn’t run the risk of wearing out its welcome. Black Dynamite is just a lot of fun.
Grade: B+
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