Black Dynamite (2009) movie review
No spoilers!
I've been recurrently attracted to this film. I'm not exactly sure when was the first time I heard about it, but I am sure it entered my watchlist when I became briefly interested in the blaxpoitation genre, and even though I ended up watching Sweet Sweetback's Badaaaaassss Song and the half animation/half live-action Coonskin, I didn't come around to Black Dynamite until years later. Why, though? I was hungry for stylish characters, the ambiance of nocturne mean streets, straightforward violence, foxy ladies, the warmth of 70’s film prints and sweet funky soundtracks- and Black Dynamite seemed to be able to provide that, along with comedy. There's also a nice atmosphere that comes with most movie genre pastiche, or spoofs that I felt attracted to. At the same time, however, movies like Planet Terror and Hobo with a Shotgun left me with a bad impression when it came to modern movies trying to rekindle the flame of exploitation cinema, failing to make something that stands on its own feet while supporting itself on "it’s bad so it's funny" jokes that don't work because they're done on purpose. Like writer Susan Sontag explained in her essay Notes on ‘Camp', campiness needs to be accidental in order to be effective.
All in all, I had no intention to get Black Dynamite out of the dark grim hole of "films I'll watch someday, maybe" within my soul, until I was watching The Dark Knight once again on TV. There's a lot of cool things on that movie that can get too easily forgotten due to its fast narrative pace and the film's total length, and one of these things to me has always been Michael Jai White's brief performance as a Mafia boss.
I know I had read about him before. I knew he was in Spawn and I knew in my mind that the Spawn guy was the Black Dynamite guy, but then, as I was going through his Wikipedia again, the realization that he was that cool mob guy from The Dark Knight saying "ENOUGH from the clone!" really struck me, for some reason.
Then, in this very convoluted chain of events, I just happened to be reading about the Kyokushin style of Karate, known for its focus on full contact bouts and hard training spirit. Reading through a list of notable practitioners of this martial art out of curiosity I saw Michael Jai White's name yet again. Wait, isn't he the Spawn guy? Oh yeah, he's also the Black Dynamite guy. Wait, he's the Dark Knight guy too? And he has black belts in any imaginable martial art including Kyokushin?!
Let's just jump to the conclusion: Michael Jai White seemed like a badass and I had to watch Black Dynamite once and for all.
The first thing one may notice about this movie is its 70’s color temperature. Apparently, director Scott Sanders and cinematographer Shawn Maurer decided to shot on Super 16 film, thus achieving a naturally gritty visual style. This, along with the use of sudden zoom-ins, 3/4 shot compositions and some "mistakes" sprinkled here and there help set the atmosphere for a convincing exploitation throwback, but, like other spoofs/homages of this kind, this can create a certain dissonance. It seems as if the movie's intention is to trick the audience's mind into thinking they're really watching something out of a shifty grindhouse, but then elements from modern filmmaking get in the way of this illusion, with little to no intention to hide them. The most obvious example is the use of CGI and green screen, which oddly enough is a favorite tool of these neo-exploitation features, and maybe the least obvious and least recurrent one, would be the use of animation.
In the movie, you can see an example of digital effects in a scene involving a helicopter explosion. As for the animation, it’s a sex scene between our hero and his romantic interest. The thing with this scene is not that it is animated, by any means- I previously mentioned Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin which is a great blaxpoitation flick that’s mostly animated. The problem (well, not a problem, more of a personal pet peeve) with the sex scene is the way it is animated, which is digital. This also breaks the celluloid illusion the movie starts evoking since the beginning- if you happen to have any sort of familiarity with animation, it won’t be hard to feel the anachronism that this entails. But I digress, this is just a nitpick. A piece of media from 2009 is what it is, it can't totally escape its own zeitgeist, as much as it takes cues from 1971. And, at the end of the day, it is a funny scene.
Michael Jai White's acting as the titular Black Dynamite serves as the vessel of its fictional world's wackiness. At times smooth, at times surreally comedic, and always cool as shit, he successfully carries the movie on his shoulders. As I mentioned earlier, what cemented him in my mind as an interesting man was his multiple martial arts belts, and he made sure to show some of his skills in this. Incredible high kicks, back kicks and hook kicks, awesome (though mostly funny) use of nunchuks, beautiful kung-fu posing, and more, are all displayed uniformly along the film's length, and this is very much an achievement in and on itself, as many martial arts movies tend to fail at having enough spectacle to keep the audience interested in the narrative in-between. Thankfully, Black Dynamite is not only kicks and punches, instead supporting itself on lots and lots of charisma provided by White and co.'s acting.
The comedic aspect of this movie is a mixed bag. Part of the humor comes from mishaps common in low budget productions, like a boom mic appearing in a shot above Dynamite's head or an actor repeating his lines immediately on the same take after "accidentally" messing them up. This is fine, but like I said, fake mistakes aren't as funny as real ones that actually end up in the final cut. And in any case, a bigger part of the humor comes simply from the movie's attitude. Enhanced by the visual direction and the constant "Dynamite! Dynamite!" music sting that separates the scenes, this attitude comes from the feel of the dialogue and how it is delivered, full of slang and soul. There's a few hiccups, though, like in a scene where Black Dynamite ridiculously recalls something said to him by a "Chinese" kid back in Vietnam, babbling ling-long-chung nonsense in a way that doesn't quite reach the point where it's funny or clever, though in retrospective, picturing him saying it while chewing the scenery like a rabid hyena, and how that scene feels like it happens out of nowhere, I’ve got to admit it still reaches a point of charm, good enough to have been kept in the movie. Still, I find it strange how that particular blend of dark and silly humor doesn't really appear again throughout the film.
Led by a both funny and ass-kicking Michael Jai White, and counting with a well selected cast that properly bring the funkiness it needs (like Tommy Davidson as the quirky pimp-wannabe Cream Corn), Black Dynamite is a fun experience. It didn't fully engage me, apart from the ass-whooping, until the third act, where the story goes insane with a complex conspiracy that really infuriates our African-American heroes in a hilarious way, plus the reveal of a mastermind that will throw anyone for a loop, also in a hilarious way. But even before that point, Black Dynamite still provides awesome fighting scenes, silly acting and a well-done 70’s funk atmosphere.
Dynamite! Dynamite!
