Black Dynamite

Listen up jive turkeys, I’m gonna tell you all about the baddest muvva the other side of the pond.  He goes by the name of Black Dynamite and yo’ betta listen up sucka because Black Dynamite is dishing out righteous justice to the man and righteous loving to the mammas.  Set in the 70s Black Dynamite is a mixture of a kung fu (bruce lee variety) and Blaxploitation with a healthy dollop of spoof.

The film starts with the murder of Black Dynamite’s younger brother who had been going off the rails for a few years.  What follows over the next 90 minutes is a romp that leads our hero to avenge his brother, save orphans and properly stick it to the man, can you dig it?  Along the way we learn of BD’s troubled past, where he served in Vietnam saving the poor Chinese people from the atrocities of war and as a former CIA agent operating with a license to kill.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that this sounds a lot like Shaft.  Let us set you straight, Black Dynamite is tougher, meaner and more of a player than Shaft could dream of; in fact Black Dynamite would be Shaft’s role model.

This film has a classic three acts and out type approach, but just as each act is wrapped up nicely with the bad guy beaten up, the next act starts and there’s another villain ready to take his place.

This all comes together nicely when the Fiendish Dr Wu is tracked to Kung Fu Island (I kid you not) and his plans to emasculate the African American male population are foiled.  Pay special attention to how they solve the problem of where the drugs are… its bloody ace!  Also, special mention must be made for the soundtrack which fits nicely into the film, some of the songs clearly written specifically to let the audience know what is going on…  “Ooo, black dynamite is going to avenge his brotherrrrrr”  Etc.

So by now you know that this film is clearly very tongue in cheek.  The actors, script, dialog, effect, continuity, scene cuts and microphone boom all do a great job making fun of the genre and it is laugh out loud funny.  One thing the film does really well is flipping between it being obvious that it is a film and these people are actors then going back into movie mode when Black Dynamite is real, it is almost seamless and allows a different approach to humour in each style.

For example we loved a great scene near the beginning where Black Dynamite starts to kick some ass while he is trying to find out who killed his brother.  The action is centred on one guy who crawls away from the carnage that BD is causing only to find BD in front on him like some ebony teleporting Kung Fu machine, and not just once and this is a clear film spoof.

In the movie vane, another scene sees Black Dynamite trying to woo the films heroine by taking her on a stroll through the newly cleaned up neighbourhood.  Whilst walking down the sidewalk they meet two young girls who are skipping.  The girlfriend asks their names and then introduces herself and Black Dynamite only for the girls to say that their mothers told them their daddy’s name was Black Dynamite.  “Errrr, hush now little girls, a lots of cats have that name” replies an uncomfortable looking Black Dynamite.

If there was one criticism to make though we thought the film missed a major cameo.  Arsenio Hall pops up for a brief spell but he doesn’t deliver all that much, his appearance is almost a bit ‘blink and you’ll miss it’.  We think that a cameo by someone like Samuel L Jackson or similar would have been the icing on the cake.

That’s not to detract however from what is a fun and enjoyable film which is definitely worth watching.  Seeing brothers slapping some skin, jive talking to each other and hearing fantastic 70s dialog will have you quoting bits of the film back to each other for ages afterwards; quotes like : “HA! I threw that shit before I walked in the room!” and “The worse thing about these pushers getting these children addicted to this new smack is that these children are orphans, and orphans don’t have parents.”

Just remember, jive turkey’s there’s no I in revoluti… I mean in Team.

Dynamite! Dynamite!