About the movie
Black Dynamite
Rating: 
Cast:
Arsenio Hall; Mykelti Williamson; Phil Morris; Kym Whitley; Nicole Sullivan; Michael Jai White; Jessica Moreno; Mike Starr; Miguel A. Núñez Jr.; Salli Richardson
Directed by:
Scott Sanders
On the web:
READER FEEDBACK
Right on, ‘Black’:
‘Dynamite’ stays true to blaxploitation roots
Beneath the good-natured retro silliness of "Black Dynamite" is something smart and new.
This re-creation of an early 1970s blaxploitation movie is vaguely in the style of an Abrahams-Zucker ("Airplane!," "Naked Gun") or Wayans Bros. genre send-up, but it's crucially different.
"Black Dynamite" is a canny and often sincere replica of a movie in the "Shaft" or "Dolemite" tradition. If a print turned up on "The Antiques Roadshow," experts might have a hard time determining whether it was an actual period piece or expert reproduction.
There are a few ingredients that betray "Dynamite" as a lovingly rendered fake, but only a few, and it never resorts to the broad farce of, say, "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka."
It works because it feels real. You can't replicate the blaxploitation movie without recreating the kick - new in the '60s and '70s - that came from the novelty of an African-American butt-kicker.
Actor Michael Jai White invented the character Black Dynamite, and plays him with an appealing earnestness - not the straight-faced mocking of say, Leslie Nielsen in "Airplane!," but something more heartfelt.
And he maintains his sincerity no matter how heightened the surrounding absurdity - someone is turning the kids at the orphanage into heroin addicts, and pouring an emasculating malt liquor into the ghetto.
Black Dynamite single-handedly and two-fistedly fights these twin plagues, cutting a wide swath through familiar blaxploitation factions - The Man, the radicals, the social workers, the criminals, the Uncle Tom politicians.
It's good fun (the period details are exquisite), yet it also reminds us of the genre's often unheralded complexity. The blaxploitation hero operated outside and against The Establishment, but he was also quintessentially American, the loner, the rugged individual true to his own code, uncorrupted but surrounded by corruption.
By corruption, and by terrible production values. On this score, "Black Dynamite" is casually ingenious - great effort was made to find and use film stock to give the movie its grainy, saturated look, and to revive the melodies, lyrics and instrumentation of period music. Even greater effort was made to recreate the fashions of the period without mocking them.
Kudos to costume designer Ruth E. Carter for cleverness and restraint - she has fun with the flamboyant outfits, but just as much fun with the straight-laced, "Dragnet"-ish attire favored by The Man.
The movie was obviously a labor of love for the props and production people, and I hope it's remembered at Oscar time.
