Natural Born Killer
Get Back
Coach Carter
Directed by Thomas Carter
Assault on Precinct 13
Directed by Jean-Francois Richet
Elektra
Directed by Rob Bowman
At this point in his career, the only way Samuel L. Jackson can show that he is especially angry is to have his head explode, a geyser of waste matter sprout from his neck, and each flying turd tagged with a graffiti-sprayed expletive. Images nearly that hyperbolic occur in Spike Jonze's new music video Get Back, a landmark, live-action cartoon for the rapper Ludacris. But Jonze's purposeful exaggeration is what's missing from the feature film Coach Carter, where Jackson's role as a high school basketball coach trying to maintain his temper while passing humility on to his players is simply ludicrous.
As the California sporting-goods merchant charged with inspiring Richmond High's team of unruly ghetto youth, Jackson pressures them to strive for academic improvement. He demands they practice good behavior (sitting in the front of their classes, wearing a tie on game day) that shows self-control and self-respect. Carter makes the boys sign a personal contract promising their commitment, but he also has to get tough, and that requires a measure of restraint-a belief in civility-that is beyond Jackson's limited dyspeptic range. This role is intended to upgrade Jackson into hero mode, yet it's possible that he has done the most damage to black male public esteem of any Hollywood actor since the 30s. His stock anger and verbalized self-loathing in film after film reinforce racist stereotypes more than they assert dignity. Jackson has, unpardonably, confused the two concepts.
To wit: No movie this year will have crazier lines of dialogue than Jackson instructing his team "'Nigger' is a derogatory term used by whites to insult our ancestors. When you're around me, I don't want to hear that shit." Say what! No contemporary moviegoer can suspend disbelief long enough to buy that from Pulp Fiction's Jules or Jackie Brown's Ordell Robbie. (In interviews for Jackie Brown, Jackson famously bragged about uttering the N word 67 times.) Jackson's limited range prevents him from displaying the integrity of a man with ethnic pride-or a human being with any social grace. When Carter complains to Mrs. Garrison (Denise Dowse), the principal of Richmond High School, that he hasn't received a report on his boys' grades, Jackson stares her down as if in lethal negotiation with a drug kingpin.
Jackson makes every conversation in Coach Carter into a pissing contest. His screen image is defined by surliness because it conveniently coincides with the image of black masculinity that hiphop has made profitable. The stereotype Jackson lives by contributes to Coach Carter's dull use of cliché. This MTV Films production is as problematic as Formula 51 or Die Hard with a Vengeance, and lags behind the social skepticism and psychological truth on view in Get Back.
Spike Jonze's video is a wild parody of Jacksonian explosiveness (its finale is a Scanners-style blast). Jonze hooks into the feverish machismo that is the source of Ludacris' rap-comedy and of Samuel L. Jackson's career desperation. All the fear and boasting that go hand-in-fist in black macho pop are presented with Jonze's ingenious method of post-modern distortion. Ludacris is shown with bulging Popeye-forearms, swinging them when he walks, not unlike a Neanderthal but also with sly, comical, musical suavity. In this get-up (a Halloween costume for the id), Ludacris achieves a self-conscious distance from his violent acting-out that is preferable to Jackson's fake "natural" flare-ups.
Get Back exults in ironic bad-boy mannerisms. Jonze realizes that this is the image pop culture celebrates more than it is the normal African-American reflex. That's the significance of the moment when Ludacris sits on a bench, while a handful of tykes apes his bravado in the background, behind the Los Angeles palm trees, klieg light beams strafing the night sky. It puts an artificial halo on hiphop machismo. As Luda struts the streets with his boys, he is joined by a retinue of bodacious Sistahs, a bovine quartet wearing checkered Chanel suits and caps. They're as strong as he is-and as funny. (It takes a hand as big as Popeye's to cup one female's butt cheek.) These women suggest the revenge of early female rapper Ms. Melodie; they're Big-Girl answers to the usual svelte video ho. And when a pesky male stands in their way, he gets tossed in the air like a deflating balloon.
All these antics comment on the crises of urban male behavior that are misrepresented in Coach Carter, where each team member's emotional problems and street temptations are quickly resolved clichés (including pop singer Ashanti blithely undergoing an abortion). Ludacris' work as an entertainer is enhanced by Jonze's high irony; together they understand the pop audience's need to gauge its enjoyment of macho license. That's something Jackson's seriousness never allows (from A Time To Kill to Changing Lanes, he always links rage to vengeance, as if black men were entitled to being unreasonable). Get Back-its warning title aims at both social antagonists and cultural commonplaces-wittily contrasts the desire for strength with its ridiculous misuse. The outrageous opening scene of Ludacris harassed by a male fan while using a public urinal just touches homophobia then launches into a full-scale lampoon of sexual panic.
Most recent hiphop music videos make you ask one question: Snoop Dogg and Lil Jon are not Stepin Fetchit? So many music video and movie directors go along with the conventions of black acting-up (the reclamation of defamation) no doubt because whites also envy/identify. Get Back is refreshing because it subverts those behavioral conventions. But the messagey absurdity of Coach Carter proves the trap that results from the enshrinement of these clichés. Samuel L. Jackson fails to "noble" his way past them. The film's cornball theme ("What you've achieved is that ever elusive victory within") is another crock when coming out of his mouth. It's not hard to imagine Ludacris saying "Bullshit!" to that.
Last time Jackson was in a high school setting, he played the vigilante schoolteacher seeking revenge in 187-one of his regular exercises in pointless machismo, just like the new Assault on Precinct 13 and Elektra. How did Jackson miss out on these films? Laurence Fishburne beat him to Precinct 13, and Jackson's biologically wrong for the feminine-macho twist that Jennifer Garner brings to Elektra. Both Fishburne's cop-killer character Bishop and Garner's eponymous assassin are too high-toned for Jackson. Each film makes an attempt at humanizing its killer that is more than we usually get from Jackson's characters. Yet, these movies are still worthless because they utilize action-film and comic-book-film conventions without increasing the audience's understanding of human endeavor.
Precinct 13 is French director Jean-François Richet's English-language remake of John Carpenter's 1976 feature debut, already a revamping of Howard Hawks' 1959 Rio Bravo. Each declension gets weaker and more violent, the violence making up in noise and brutality what the newer filmmakers lack in seriousness. Richet's reverberating sound effects and his Zemeckis-slick camera moves mark him as a mindless craftsman. He's out to jolt viewers rather than take them through the feelings and behavior that motivated Hawks' original story of siege, camaraderie and deliverance. This super-adolescent version is about siege, distrust and corruption. Set in Detroit on the night that an old, outdated police station is retired prior to an expensive new building being put to use, how modern cities have tragically succumbed to social dilapidation isn't even a theme here. Richet's only about the bang-bang. Fishburne's Bishop comes together with Ethan Hawke's angsty police officer Roenick to fight a common enemy, but the neo-racism is insultingly old fashioned: The good guys still wear white.
In Elektra, Jennifer Garner's post-feminist confusion is especially tired after Angelina Jolie's sexual gymnastics as Lara Croft. But Garner's Barbie-doll girlishness (her long torso and gangly athleticism) is interesting only because it seems so awkward. Marvel Comics' feminizing of machismo and occult warfare does no more than distract gullible viewers from its trendy rejection of old morality (as in Hellboy). In these movies-and Coach Carter-Hollywood reveals its craven disregard for how people really live. Each star appeals to the yahoo, to girl-power and to righteous school boards, while the films treat all audiences like the N word. Thank God that Spike Jonze is willing to penetrate a fantasy whose time has run out.