MasterChugs Theater: ‘Black Dynamite’

The spoof (aka broad parody) sub-genre is a schizophrenic beast. At its best, the spoof can treat you to something as sublime as Airplane!, as mindlessly amusing as the Scary Movie series, or as stunningly worthless as Epic Movie. It takes skill to make a movie bad on purpose, but movies that are bad by accident can be a lot more fun. But the spoof remains the comedy sub-genre for filmmakers who are also movie geeks. Basically, you need to have seen a lot of Airport movies to write Airplane!, and you need to have some solid experience with blaxploitation movies to produce something like Hollywood Shuffle, I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, or the newest arrival: the worthy Black Dynamite, which aims to do to Shaft and Superfly what The Naked Gun did to police procedurals.

Whether the plot makes any sense or not is immaterial (hint: it doesn’t really)—it’s how it hilariously plays out that is key to the success of the movie. But for the record, two things have really pissed off Mr. Black Dynamite so much so that he has to take time away from bedding sexy girls and practicing his kung-fu: Someone killed his brother Ben in a drug deal gone wrong and someone is getting little orphans hooked on smack.

Taking it to the mean streets, he, and his meticulously groomed mustache, roughs up some of the city’s ridiculously named hustlers like: Chicago Wind, Cream Corn, Black Hand Jack, Chocolate Giddy-Up and Tasty Freeze for some answers. This leads to a brain dizzying scene which has him and some righteous Black Panther brothers playing a game of word association—starting with “melt in yo mouth” and ending with “little dick”. It may look like a simple connection, but the convoluted route they take will cause you to fall out of your seat.

Inexplicably, yet equally funny, he’s taken to the farfetched locales of Kung-Fu Island (where he meets the fiendish Dr. Wu) and the White House.

Like a belated chapter in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse epic , it replicates not only the themes and styles of movies like Trouble Man or Dolemite but also some of the technical lapses and period excesses that give those pictures their lasting, if minor, camp value. A boom mike drifts down into the frame; an actor recites stage directions along with his lines. The camera zooms, pans and shifts focus as if it were being wielded by an optometrist on a cocaine binge.

The acting is stiff, the dialogue painfully self-conscious, the action sequences choreographed and edited to look as cartoonish as possible. All of which is fun, for a while, in an academic kind of way. The title character—always referred to by his full name—is a solemn ghetto avenger played by Mr. White. He mixes it up with cops, pimps, hustlers and revolutionaries, all on his way to uncovering the evil machinations of (who else?) The Man.

The thing is, The Man is not the man he used to be, and the filmmakers’ tweaking of old-style militancy and old-fashioned racial oppression never amounts to much beyond a send-up of pop-cultural attitudes that were often self-mocking to begin with.

Michael Jai White, who co-wrote the script with director Scott Sanders and Byron Minns, plays Black Dynamite with an impeccable poker-faced scowl and a hint of something more; one of the film’s juiciest jokes is that he’s the only actor on screen who reads his lines with even a pinch of subtext. It’s been a long journey since his time in Spawn and his deleted scene from Kill Bill. Sanders doesn’t pack in as many gags as the earlier mentioned classic spoofs have seen before, nor as much blatant schtick as vintage Brooks. His movie holds on to that grindhouse spirit with a little less slapstick and a little more genuine cool; a few of our hero’s quips and moves are genuinely badass, a loving caricature of the original films.

That’s not to say Black Dynamite himself is above reproach: White, who also co-wrote, has a lot of fun with the contradictions of blaxploitation heroes – namely that a studly, murdering hardass who plays by his own rules is also a righteous, orphan-loving do-gooder who gets in bed with a socially conscious activist, decrying his enemies for ‘selling drugs to the community.’ In a few sublime moments, the actors and filmmakers even let the seams show-White in particular does a terrifically subtle double-take when the aforementioned boom mike drops into a shot.

Just as Airplane! did thirty years prior with the prevailing disaster movies of the time, Black Dynamite manages to stand on its own as a comedy even if the viewer doesn’t get the “inside story” of the movie. It is nearly flawless in its execution—even making the credits fun enough to sit through and watch scroll by.