Superfly

Remakes rarely work. They nearly always miss out on the magic that made the original sing. For every one that turns out well there's two that are awful. For Scarface there's a Halloween and a Robocop. For It there's a Total Recall and The Mummy. For Magnificent Seven there's a Chips and a (sweet jesus) Baywatch. Superfly is a remake of the 1972 blaxploitation film Super Fly and it falls into the awful category with ease. Nothing about it works.

Youngblood Priest is an Atlanta based drug dealer who wants out of the life before he's killed or is forced to kill. To do this he wants to make one last massive deal, big enough to never have to worry about money again. But in order to get his hands on that much product he has to go around his usual supplier and this stirs up a whole mess of trouble involving cartels and corrupt cops. On top of that he has to deal with a rival crew called Snow Patrol (yep) who want to take his piece of the business.

The best blaxploitation films rose from the aftermath of the 1960's civil rights movements. Enpowered by the movement and raging about the deaths of it's most prominent faces like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King they sought to show the African American experience in a way that had never been shown on film before. There was a righteous anger to them, a fierce desire to burn away the cinematic caricatures created of them. Shaft, Super Fly, Foxy Brown, Black Caesar, Coffy and so on. They succeeded because they were actually about something, they had something so say about Black people's place in America or lackthereof. 2018's Superfly remake has nothing to say apart from money is good. It's become a film for Trump's America. It glorifies things the earlier films had railed against. It's an exercise in style over substance. The best thing about it is Youngblood Priest's hair. It's a grand head of hair in fairness but it won't carry you through 116 minutes.

This is a terrible film. It's cheap and shoddy looking, filled with terrible acting from both unknown and more established performers and it's cliched as hell and predictable too. It's the kind of film that turns up on ITV4 at 2 o'clock in the morning where the only people who would take anything from it are chronic insomniacs looking for nudity and violence. In a time where Moonlight won best picture, Black Panther broke down cinematic barriers worldwide and Blackkklansman took potshots at Hollywood's depiction of Black people it's a shame to see Black cinema still heading in this direction. I know as a White man its definitely not for me to judge things like this but this kind of depiction isn't good for anyone.

The regressive attitudes towards woman depicted in the original Superfly are still present and correct too. They exist to please Youngblood or to die so he can suffer. It's always a pity when a remake carries forwards the worst aspects of the era the original was made in. Just when you think all is lost one plot strand about police violence seems like it might have something interesting to say but it just fades away in a blizzard of dollar bills, strippers and glorified gunplay. This film could have been a perfect vehicle to rail against misogyny, sexism and institutionalised violence but nope, slow motion kicks to the face look cooler....

Ron O'Neal who played Youngblood Priest in the original Super Fly wasn't a particularly good actor but the man had presence to burn and he was believable in the part of the hypocritical man who saw himself as a hero while treating his girlfrend like muck and sampling his own wares. In this 2018 remake Youngblood Priest is played by Trevor Jackson, a man without an ounce of charisma or depth and when you don't give a shit about the lead of a film you're on a hiding to nothing straight away. He's the smoothest man in Atlanta, has two women he pleasures into the ground in a scene that wouldn't feel out of place in one of those ubiquitous erotic thrillers that used to turn up late at night on sky movie, he's the most respected criminal in the city, a martial arts master who's almost supernaturally fast and an absolute crackshot with a gun. With a good actor you could nearly get away with this but here you'll just scoff at everything he does. He's just not remotely credible as a human being. Better known actors like Jason Mitchell and Michael K. Williams appear but don't even try. Both have put in immense work in TV's The Wire and The Chi and Mitchell was fantastic as Eazy-E in Straight Outta Compton so watching them both sleepwalk through this is frustrating. I won't even mention the people playing Snow Patrol because it.......nope.....it hurts too much.

It's shit. Don't bother watching it. It's offensive, it's dull, it just sucks. How it got a cinema release is beyond me. Films 100 times better than this bypass the cinema every week but somehow this tripe gets booked? I'm baffled. It's a film destined for the €1.50 shelf in Dealz.