WHO'D HAVE thunk it? Blaxploitation, an entirely opportunistic subgenre cobbled together from chop-socky action, boom-chicka-boom soft focus and caveman gender politics, has somehow survived the 1970s and shaped the aesthetics of the new millenium.
Forged as a panicked studio response to the box-office success of Melvin Van Peeble's seminal Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song(1971), it did not, historically speaking, take long for the entire funky sector to slip into parody.
Maybe, in the age of raised fists and Black Power, white mainstream audiences needed some humour to accept such potent icons as Shaft, Hammer and Foxy Brown. Or maybe zoot suits are just inherently ridiculous. Either way, long before Snoop Dogg turned out in a fur coat, long before the dead goldfish of I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, blaxploitation was not entirely on the level.
It hardly matters. This odd form has proved surprisingly durable; just look at Jason Statham's Geezer Fu pictures or Wu Tang's bushido-driven milieu. Black Dynamiteignores such recent innovations to take blaxploitation back to its cheap, cheerful and frequently hilarious roots.
A masterful comic pastiche, the film derives much merriment from emulating the eccentricities and kinky multiracial couplings of its period predecessors. Screenplay directions are said aloud along with the dialogue, split screens offer up all kinds of jive-ass double-crosses, and The Man is never too far away.
Feared by evildoers and adored by skantily clad women, our titular hero, played with no little elan by Michael Jai White, must track down the no-good turkeys who killed his brother and unravel a conspiracy that goes all the way up to the top.
Director Scott Saunders, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with White, incorporates enough authentic grammar and knowing gags to keep true believers happy - "Suddenly, I'd like to leave your island!" - while he gets on with entertaining the masses.
Black Dynamitemight be a one-joke movie, but when that joke can produce action one-liners such as "Donuts don't wear alligator shoes", who are we to argue?
