***/****
starring Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, Salli Richardson-Whitfield
screenplay by Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, Scott Sanders
directed by Scott Sanders
by Jefferson Robbins When last we saw Michael Jai White, it was in the biggest movie of 2008, getting a shiv in the uvula from Heath Ledger. The veteran action performer (Spawn, Universal Soldier) wants to shrug that one off with a joke of his own. The pre-credits scenes in Scott Sanders's Black Dynamite, a vehicle created specifically for White, make you fear another I'm Gonna Git You Sucka or Undercover Brother–a satire on '70s blaxploitation tropes that uses actual, professional camera setups, editing, and continuity. That doesn't last long. Black Dynamite finds its ground once Sanders appropriates the which-end-of-the-camera aesthetic of the worst/best black grindhouse cinema. (Rudy Ray Moore's Dolemite is uppermost on the creators' minds.) The titular hero is all that Shaft and Black Belt Jones wish they could be: Vietnam vet, ex-CIA assassin, martial arts master, and urban avenger, capable of sexually sating five ethnically-diverse ladies at once. (Understandably, he's prone to a lot of flashbacks.) There's a "new smack on the streets," flooding the ghetto in tandem with a plot to sexually disempower American black men. When his brother is killed in the crossfire, B.D. roundhouse kicks his way through a passel of thugs, Mafiosi, government operatives, and dangling boom mics–pointing out, with the up-trending body count, that the heroes of these things are seldom better than cackling psychopaths. White turns out to be adept at kicking ass while cracking jokes; someone should have given him an action-comedy years ago. It would be nice if romantic interest Gloria (Salli Richardson-Whitfield, a crackerjack straight-woman) had followed in Pam Grier's footsteps by proving Black Dynamite's female equal, but the character amounts to mere bed candy. Too, the filler is evident, though these points are great excuses to go get another beer. Ultimately, Black Dynamite achieves that confrontation with American political power that so much cinema of the 1970s–grindhouse or otherwise, overtly or in subtext–seemed to demand.
