Blaxploitation is the cinematic equivalent of blues -- American film's only indigenous genre, created by blacks for blacks and assimilated into white culture just as soon as it could figure out how to A) play it and B) sell it. Blaxploitation is barely middle-aged by comparison, however, having launched with a radioactive bang in 1970 by Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and having yielded a Cadillac trunk's worth of rangy classics during its virile '70s heyday. How fitting, then, that the genre perhaps finds itself in the prime of life today with the hilarious, high-spirited tribute Black Dynamite.
Michael Jai White plays the title character, an ex-CIA-operative/Vietnam vet/contemporary crusader sparked to vengeance when his younger brother Jimmy turns up dead in a drug deal gone bad. Initially attributed to an overdose, Jimmy's death stirs both remorse and fury in Black Dynamite (don't you dare abbreviate his name); he made a deathbed promise to his mother that he would watch over the young man, a pledge shown in flashbacks to be a little more difficult to keep than it sounded. Here, White and director Scott Sanders interrupt their campy riff for a myth-busting origin story -- their hero's early, vulnerable years, reversed with one swift outrage that turns a tormented black kid into a self-reliant enforcer.
That hairtrigger anguish stays with Black Dynamite over the years, and is fascinating to compare to the development (real or imagined) of a Sweetback or a Shaft or a Superfly, all of whose very existence symbolized a rebuke to white-culture values after the immolation of the civil-rights era. White's protagonist is different -- borne of altruism, witness to devastation, and now, after Jimmy's demise, a civic firebrand. He's a ladies man, too, of course, satisfying up to five women at a time but incrementally devoted to the militant (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) whose ideology lacks the refinement of soul.
He's also very funny, almost to a fault. White and Sanders themselves tend to overdose on self-awareness, nearly pushing their tongues through their cheeks with ironic nods to actual blaxploitation-era tropes like heroin being pushed to orphans, pimp councils, gratuitous kung-fu and gaspingly poor continuity -- as if these symbolized rather than merely informed the genre's enduring legacy. (Despite it all, the Wayanses' I'm Gonna Git You Sucka remains the definitive blaxploitation parody.) As Black Dynamite mounts his offensive to get smack off the streets and solve his brother's increasingly suspicious murder (a government-issue bullet casing is discovered at the crime scene), the set-up grows proportionately absurd. Without spoiling anything, let it suffice to say that when White and Sanders say the conspiracy goes all the way to the top, it really goes all the way to the top. It also includes malt liquor with cultural consequences even deadlier than alcoholism, a wry jab at white industry's fear, distrust and envy of the black male. It's subtler than Dolemite gunning down a white dude for its own sake 35 years ago, but no less piercing.
Dynamite flourishes as a stylistic exercise as well, with Sanders and cinematographer Shawn Maurer achieving near-flawless exposure on some pretty tricky reversal film stock. The effect is one of deep saturation in a soft '70s amber, replete with vintage zooms and purposely inert eye-level confrontations. (With an actor as physically spectacular as White, anything shot too low would make him more scary than relatable.) It's both a testament to a bygone era and a reminder that it never really died, imploring a similar sense of conviction from the makers of contemporary black cinema from Friday to Notorious to Barbershop and even Precious -- the latter of whose grim, fragmented fantasias owe as much to Melvin Van Peebles as source novelist Sapphire. It's the best tribute Black Dynamite could pay, really. At least until the sequel.