Review of Black Dynamite (2009) by Kenneth L — 11 Feb 2011

I don't want to oversell this, but this might be one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. Top 50, at least. It is an extremely thorough-going tribute to/parody of 1970s Blaxploitation movies like Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy. It both makes fun of those old movies and is one of them. The jokes just keep on coming consistently throughout the movie's whole run time, and involve just about every element of its making: deliberately stilted acting, a clichà (C)d story, hilarious and quotable cheesy dialogue, campy theme music, awkward editing and storytelling, goofy fight scenes, and so on. The movie takes all of the amateurish elements of earlier Blaxploitation movies and makes them essential facets of itself. The pastiche is so dead-on that you might not even realize the movie is playing with you.

I have to give a lot of credit to Michael Jai White, who co-wrote the screenplay and gives a really great performance as the titular Black Dynamite (even his auntie calls him that). The rest of the cast, which includes Tommy Davidson, Mykelti Williamson, and Arsenio Hall among others, remembers the key to being funny in a movie like this: act as if the movie weren't supposed to be funny. I've read Roger Ebert say that a man wearing a funny hat isn't funny; a man wearing a funny hat who doesn't know he's wearing a funny hat is very funny. No one in the cast of this movie knows they're wearing a funny hat (or Afro, as the case might be).

I could go into more specifics about what makes this movie so awesome, but that would just take some of the fun out of it for you. This movie is on Netflix Instant, so go check it out now. It's great.