Black Dynamite

2009-10-16
By Sergio Mims

CAST:
MICHAEL JAI WHITE
SALLI RICHARDSON-WHITFIELD
TOMMY DAVIDSON
PHIL MORRIS
MIKE STARR
KYM WHITLEY
ROGER WU

WRITTEN BY:
MICHAEL JAI WHITE
SCOTT SANDERS
BRYON MINNS

DIRECTED BY: SCOTT SANDERS

**** FOUR STARS

Simply put, Black Dynamite is an uproarious, constantly inventive, totally delirious, absolute joy.  As conceived by its talented director and co-writer Scott Sanders along with lead actor and co-writer Michael Jai White, the film is light years ahead of the other wacky send-ups (Undercover Brother as one example) that have billed themselves as homage to the blaxploitation era.

Set back when Tricky Dick was sitting in the Oval Office and black was beautiful, Black Dynamite is an upraised fist screaming I’m Black and I’m proud and sees the beauty and the humor of that time.  Younger generations, to their great loss, missed out on the thrill that the baby boomer got seeing strong, ultra-masculine black men and tough sexy women getting back at the “the man”, righting wrongs and laying waste to all enemies in payback for centuries of oppression.  It was a wonderful time when black heroes such as Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and the ultimate definition of black masculinity, Jim Brown, were the norm and sexuality was open and apparent.

Black Dynamite is both a hardcore fanboy tribute to those films and a raucous, crazy, endlessly entertaining parody of the genre. Much of the dialogue is actually inverted clever variations of real dialogue from those films and the plot is a crazy quilt of inside references, actual scenes and plotlines and ideas obviously lifted from many blaxploitation films such as Three The Hard Way, Coffy, Black Belt Jones, Willie Dynamite, Cleopatra Jones and a dozen others with a good chunk of Chuck Norris’ Vietnam set “Missing in Action” Grade Z, cheapo, action thrillers thrown in for good measure. Sanders gets the whole tone and sensibilities of the genre exactly right down to the loud, kaleidoscopic, wide-lapel, bell-bottomed clothes, the huge afros, the music and the sloppy production values.

Sanders and his game cast infuse Black Dynamite with a gleeful sense of fun and a but also a touch of wistfulness for a time when black men were real men on the screen,  not men in dresses and fat suits. In the film, White plays the titled Black Dynamite, obviously based on Jim Brown’s persona, a self styled, comically overblown 1970’s hero who discovers a dastardly plot to destroy all black men in the most horrific worse way possible. The sinister conspiracy takes Dynamite from the hard mean streets of L.A. to the jungles of Southeast Asia to the mastermind of the fiendish plan before it’s unleashed.

As the hero of the title, White gives a perfectly realized comic gem of a performance. Both broad and nuanced, White slyly displays the absurdity of it all. It’s a self mocking, hysterically brilliant performance that captures so the attitude and tone of those characters perfectly. Salli Richardson-Whitfield is as well perfectly cast as Dynamite’s love interest (and in the hilarious film trailer, a “former Ebony Fashion Fair model”).  With her chiseled features, depending on how the scene is lit, she resembles both Pam Grier and Vonetta McGee, the two queens of the genre.

Black Dynamite is an inventively funny, goofy, yet wonderfully directed and acted film that for a brief time brings an extraordinary genre back to life.