02/12/10 - Black Dynamite

Black Dynamite (2009, 90 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190536/

My roommate and I follow up the 2004 classic Kung fu with the soon-to-be classic from 2009 named Black Dynamite. The present day made movie that pays homage to the blaxploitation genre of years long past was one that I had been wanting to watch for a while so I was really excited to check it out.

Black Dynamite is Michael Jai White and his mission is to find out why his brother was killed. Through an incredibly complicated plot that makes fun of itself repeatedly we get a great homage to the blaxploitation genre. There's some other characters here, but I really feel that only Michael Jai White is worth mentioning.

I honestly feel that there's way too many characters here with similarly silly names that don't add to the plot and that's part of why I didn't mention them above. But I also feel that blaxploitatio movies in general have way too many similar characters that don't add anything. So I feel it's hard to penalize the movie much for this. There's about one or two side characters that stand out as more important and this is how hose older movies were as well. As for Michael Jai White, he does a great job. I really felt like he did an astounding job at being a lead for this type of movie, hamming it up exactly when necessary.

So the important thing here is to see how the movie pays homage to these older movies. The first thing it does right is the way it's shot. It looks absolutely terrible with a good grainy look. Just like how Planet Terror does, it really feels like you're watching an old print. Next, we get stupid continuity errors. Noticeably, Black Dynamite never reloads his gun and shoots one time at least ten times from his small gun. There's also two car crashes that use the exact same crash footage even though the set ups aren't similar. All of this is done very very well. Sometimes, there's fleeting moments of modern techniques creeping in. I don't seem to remember split screens being employed as much in the older movies as they are in Black Dynamite so that's a minor complaint. Similarly, some of the explosions and blood shots are a little too well done for a "bad" movie. All in all, though, this aspect of the film is handled really well. I even get the impression that someone could pick this movie up, simply knowing it was a goofy movie trying to look bad and not having seen any 1970s blaxploitation movies, and still find it incredibly enjoyable.

One of the reasons for this is that the first ten minutes of the movie are downright hilarious. I haven't laughed this hard at a film in a long long time. The main reason for this is the incredibly witty banter that really does seem to come straight from a 1970s blaxploitation movie. It's over-the-top and silly and works to perfection. These laughs keep coming all the way through the film but they peter out until about the last twenty minutes at which they pick up again. Overall, the humor really works well, but the previous sentence does somewhat hint at one of the major problems of Black Dynamite: pacing. The movie is a meager 90 minutes long (though actually this is quite long compared to the blaxploitation movies) and this is probably about 20 minutes too long. As Black Dynamite searches for his brother's killer, he really goes through about three or four picaresque adventures or so. But after about the third one, there's a long lull before he gets back into action again. This is about the 50 minute or so of the film and for a while after that (pretty much until the final 20 minutes of fights) the movie drags on and on. There's some humor thrown in as the gang uncovers the real people behind the entire operation (in a hilarious scene where all the black gangsters are incredibly versed in Roman and Greek mythology) but it's clearly the weak point of the film.

Another weak point overall is the final fight in the White House. The battle with Richard Nixon where nunchucks are used is really good, but when the ghost of Abraham Lincoln intervenes or when Patricia Nixon come in it's pretty stupid. These characters are too over-the-top for what the movie does in my opinion. But just Black Dynamite taking on Richard Nixon with kung fu is pretty hilarious.

Overall, I gave this film a 7/10. Black Dynamite does just about everything right during all about the previously mentioned time period and some parts of the final fight. Unfortunately this 20 minutes of the film is really really boring and it hurts the whole product. The movie is certainly worth a watch for a variety of reasons and I am glad I watched it. I feel the group behind it really got a lot right as they paid homage to these older films.