BLACK DYNAMITE (Scott Sanders, 2009)

Humor: 8/10
Editing: 10/10
Overall Aesthetics: 10/10
Quotability: 7/10
Jive-Ass Turkeys Left Around When Black Dynamite Gets Through: 0/10

The Bottom Line: Just when I started to fear no one remembered how to make a genre farce anymore, Black Dynamite came along to take its place among the best.

For those of you who don't know, the 1970s saw the release of dozens of B-movies which cashed in on the political frustrations of Black America at the time.  These films were politically troubling in that they equated Black empowerment with excessive violence and aggressive sexuality.  Also, most of them were pretty poorly-made.  But they have undeniable historical importance for American cinema, and as such, continue to be studied by film historians, who have grouped these films under the genre description 'blaxploitation.'

Black Dynamite, then, is to blaxploitation movies what Airplane! was to disaster movies and Blazing Saddles was to westerns.  Its hero (Michael Jai White), who is called Black Dynamite by even his dying mother in a flashback to when he was ten, is an ex-CIA agent who retired after a traumatic experience in Vietnam.  He comes out of retirement to avenge the murder of his brother, who got too close to something while investigating a new street drug wreaking havoc on the Black community.  So, of course, in searching for his brother's killers, Black Dynamite picks up the trail of the conspiracy his brother was on to.  I won't tell you how high the conspiracy goes or with whom it ends, because that would ruin some of the fun of the absolutely priceless climactic nunchuk battle.  But if Scorsese's Taxi Driver revealed the psychosis behind Charles Bronson-style conservative revenge films, Black Dynamite reveals the pathological paranoia of many blaxploitation films.

This isn't the first send-up of blaxploitation in recent years.  Malcolm D. Lee attempted something similar in 2002 with Undercover Brother, which was a very funny movie.  But I think Black Dynamite is more clever.  That's not to say that clever is necessarily better, but it's just a different kind of humor.  Whereas Undercover Brother focuses mostly on (well-written and well-delievered) fried chicken and hot sauce jokes and Zucker brothers-style sight gags, Black Dynamite mostly pokes fun at the idiosyncrasies of the films it parodies.

The excessive violence of blaxploitation gets converted here into some wonderful slapstick moments to which verbal description can't do justice.  The low-production values of those films is recreated meticulously, from the high-contrast 16mm film stock to the boom mike that's clearly in the frame during a motivational speech. They say you need to be great to be a clown, in which case my hat goes off to Cinematographer Shawn Maurer and editor Adrian Younge. Take it from someone who's made films: it's not easy to intentionally shoot and edit a movie so that it looks like it was poorly made. Younge also deserves kudos for his authentic-sounding funk score.  The acting is also intentionally and hilariously wooden.  My personal favorite is the random thug who reads his stage directions along with his lines. 

So I guess what I'm saying is that Black Dynamite is the thinking man's stupid movie.  Yes, some of its jokes are academic references to obscure old movies. But will the casual movie lover still laugh out loud throughout?  In the words of B.D. himself, "you bet your ass and half a titty."

P.S. If you want a crash course in blaxploitation before you see this movie, the seminal films of the genre are Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971), and Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972).