Black Dynamite

Directed by Scott Sanders

Runtime: 90 min.

UNIMAGINATIVE EFFORT—THE kind of effort that actor-producerwriter Michael Jai White and writerdirector Scott Sanders put into Black Dynamite—shows the lack of thought that sometimes goes into the hard work of moviemaking. Some films are clearly the wrong thing to do and Black Dynamite—a spoof of ’70s Blaxploitation movies—contributes nothing to the world.White and Sanders waste their own, supposedly artistic, ambitions by ruthlessly ignoring any personal or social issues of life in the new millennium, yet flashing back to an era about which they are uninformed as well as uninspired.

Portraying Black Dynamite, a kung-fu instructor and private eye,White steps into the platform shoes of ’70s black grindhouse icons. His actor’s commitment is as absolute as Tom Hardy’s in Bronson, but without Hardy’s depth.Tall, handsome and athletic,White replicates the sexual potency that Jim Brown, Bernie Case, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly displayed, yet he simultaneously mocks their sincerity by making Black Dynamite an excessively flamboyant ghetto peacock with shallow, laughable principles. His primary mission is to eradicate malt liquor from the ghetto due to its anti-Viagra effects.

The incessant silliness of Black Dynamite ignores how serious Blaxploitation movies could be (Black Caesar, Bucktown, Hell Up in Harlem, Black Eye, Book of Numbers, Cool Breeze, Melinda,Trick Baby and Gordon’s War offered some of the most direct social and economic critique since 1950s noir).The movement embarrassed Hollywood liberalism only because it was relegated to low budgets and slapdash technique.White and Sanders aren’t aware of the great paradox defining Blaxploitation: that it warped out of the progressive impulses of black social consciousness.

Hits like Shaft and Superfly were trashy misrepresentation of civil rights–era advancement; they evinced pitiful compromise with Hollywood’s social and aesthetic hierarchies (summarized in The Godfather: “They’re animals anyway, let them lose their souls.”) Those Hollywood B-movies had less ethical conviction than Melvin Van Peebles’ highly politicized 1971’s Sweet Sweetback Baadasssss Song, which even challenged black audiences to take their social and artistic consciousness more seriously. But White and Sanders ignore the difference.They seem tragically dispossessed of a black cultural tradition. Black Dynamite attempts to validate the depressing, post-Tarantino experience of laughing at triviality, indulging nonsense.

Tarantino’s “genius” is to take politics and morality out of movies—as in Jackie Brown’s “post-racial” Pam Grier revival and his anti-democratic Inglourious Basterds. But it further embarrasses Hollywood Liberalism when White and Sanders follow Tarantino’s lead and reduce Blaxploitation to fetishized nostalgia—something even white hipsters can put on with their fedoras.

Black Dynamite’s rhyming dialogue, outré costumes, crazy character names and ridiculously extended fight scenes distort the legacy of Willie Dynamite (1974), a film so audaciously designed it already targeted the genre’s excesses. Plus,White and Sanders cannot match the brilliant, comic self-dramatizations of Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite films—especially his great sequel The Human Tornado (1976), which combined party records, porn and spy movie motifs.

Black Dynamite premiered at last winter’s Sundance Film Festival—proof of the indie movements’ clueless patronization. What good is this spoof after the definitive pop-culture satire of TV’s The Chappelle Show, In Living Color and the Wayans family’s genre lampoons? Black Dynamite embraces the indie world’s Jim Crow segregation. It is so self-limiting that it can’t function as an industry satire like Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder. Robert Downey’s precedent-setting blackface performance in that film makes White’s unimaginative effort ultimately pointless.