Film Reviews

Black Dynamite

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• Details: US/84mins 15A

The parody is the step-child in the basement that most movie aficionados don't like to talk about. For the rare occasions when they do work (Airplane, Scary Movie) there are countless times when they're just plain embarrassing (Disaster Movie, Date Movie anything else with 'Movie' in the title). About time then. Black Dynamite is hilarious, but it's also very well made, with a cast and director who know exactly what they're doing - not just throwing crude gags at the wall until one of them sticks.
Spawn star Michael Jai White is the titular bad-ass, Black Dynamite; the kind of do-gooding anti-hero who makes Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer look like a couple of transsexual hookers working a Star Trek convention. Dynamite has to take time out from having group relations with his many "bitches" when his younger brother is killed by some drug-peddling hoodlums. Looking for revenge, he paints the town red with the blood of hoodrats, and uncovers a nationwide conspiracy in the process.
An obvious take on Shaft and some of the blaxploitation movies of the 70s that cheaply followed it, everything here is played extremely straight. You really feel like you're watching a cheap movie that bangs of retro, and at no point do you get the impression that anyone is trying to be ironic. This is something similar to what Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino tried to do a few years ago with Grindhouse, only with a different genre. It has enough smarts to keep your hardcore film geek interested, but also has the laughs to appeal to a much broader audience.
White is hilarious in the lead role. A martial arts expert who occasionally pops up in mainstream fare like The Dark Knight between headlining direct-to-DVD flicks, his skull-cracking hero nails the tone of the movie perfectly. It really feels like something Bobby Bowfinger would have made if Hollywood let him, and that seems to be exactly what the filmmakers were going for. Booms come into frame, actors recite lines like they're reading them directly, and the fight scenes are hilariously over the top.
Do yourself a favour and go see this. Where else would you hear someone being called a "diabolical d**k shrinking motherf**ker"?

Review by Mike Sheridan