Review: Superfly

Drug dealer Youngblood Priest (Trevor Jackson) wants to set up one last score before he is able to retire. To do this, he’ll have to screw over his martial-arts mentor Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams), as well as watch out for corrupt cops (Jennifer Morrison!) and several swaggering rivals in the drug game (Esai Morales, Big Bank Black, and Kaalan Walker among them).

 

I knew instinctively this 2018 remake of the 1972 Blaxploitation classic was going to be bad. It’s directed by a hippity hop video director simply known as Director X (He’s worked with the likes of T.I., Drake, Little Mix, and the repulsive R. Kelly). How could it possibly be any good? I just didn’t know it was going to be borderline “Psycho” remake levels of bad. Scripted by Alex Tse (co-writer of the interesting 2009 “Watchmen”), this pointless remake ends up far less a remake of the Ron O’Neal-starring Blaxploitation film, and more inspired by Tupac, and directed like a hippity hop music video. I think Mr. X (who – get this – used to be known as ‘Little X’. Yep, Little X!) thinks he’s being un-ironically clever in bringing the blaxploitation era to the hip hop world. Even worse than you likely expect, a pointless remake that by translating the Blaxploitation tale to the hip-hop era, merely creates an extended music video. Six minutes in and people ‘make it rain’, it’s apparently ‘TMZ shit’, someone’s ‘trippin’, and there’s lots of apparent maternal fornicators. All nerdy white man jokes aside, it’s one of the worst remakes I’ve seen in a long time. Top it off with a charisma-free performance by Trevor Jackson and 2018’s worst hairdo, and yeah…this wasn’t fun for me. At all.

 

Jackson is immediately wrong as Youngblood Priest, looking like a Bollywood musical’s interpretation of a drug dealer. Seriously, this guy has been spending more time on his hair than most women, it seems. This Youngblood Priest is about as menacing and intimidating as Tracy Morgan for fuck’s sake. He entirely lacks presence, charisma, menace, or the ability to speak articulately. Ron O’Neal had each and every one of these qualities for his interpretation of the character – and more. What’s worse is that the very fine Michael K. Williams is right there showing Jackson how it’s done (and even he is just OK by his own lofty standards), but wasted in the boring role of Scatter, reshaped here into an MMA-instructing mentor role. The very definition of a poseur, Jackson mumbles his way through a dreadful supposedly hardboiled narration as well. Lines like ‘No car can outrun fate’ sound about as profound as a Vin Diesel “Fast and the Furious” monologue. It’s a lot of posturing and MF’ing, none of it cool or genuinely stylish. Other cast members not doing their best work include a stereotyped Esai Morales and a stupefyingly miscast Jennifer Morrison in total ‘try-hard’ mode as a scummy corrupt cop. Who on Earth thought a total lightweight like Morrison could play a tattooed, drug-using corrupt cop? She’s unsubtle, unconvincing, and frankly embarrassing. A neck tattoo? Really?

 

There are only two scenes in the entire film that work, and they’re the two scenes that most resemble the original film. The first is when Director X gives us Curtis Mayfield’s superb anti-drug ‘Pusherman’ in much the same conflicting montage way that Gordon Parks Jr. implemented it in the original film. In both films you have the anti-drug song playing over scenes of seeming endorsement of the drug trade as a kind of revolting, question-asking irony (It shouldn’t work, yet it does). It’s not quite as effective this time around because the film is a lot more hollow, but it still works to some extent. Also working is the sex scene, this time a shower threesome. It’s actually sexier than the similar scene in the original, full credit where it’s due.

 

Rap music videos are predominantly made out of Blaxploitation clichés to begin with, and here’s a remake of a Blaxploitation film made in the rap video style and clichés as though it’s somehow profound. It’s just boring and useless macho posturing bullshit.

 

Rating: D-