Toronto After Dark 2009 – Black Dynamite

When The Man kills Black Dynamite’s only brother he makes it his mission to make him pay. Along the way he discovers that his brother’s murder is only one piece to a larger puzzle that includes smack in orphanages and bring the Black Man to his knees. Add some hoes, kung-fu, smack, jive-talk, boobs, pimp suits, and donuts and chili and what you get is an incredible movie that is both love letter and spoof that is not to be missed. Already a selection at Sundance, as well as at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, this movie is set to take audiences by storm.

Written by Michael Jai White, Byron Minns and Scott Sanders, this movie has done something very special. Unlike the recent comedy offerings from Hollywood, this movie will make you laugh the whole way through, but also force you to think a little. The jokes in Black Dynamite range from the slapstick to the intelligent, forcing the viewer to pause mid-guffaw to realize why they’re laughing so hard, and then laughing harder.  It shows you why it’s funny but with a tender eye, designed to endear you to the original Blaxploitation source material. It is the kind of spoof that makes you want to go find the movies that inspired it, because to make something this good, they would have had to be amazing.

Boasting a very well rounded cast of cameos including Arsenio Hall, Nicole Sullivan and Tommy Davidson, the film feels solid because of its talent, with those cameos bringing some of the films most  memorable moments – and loudest laughs. Biggest credit, of course, goes to Michael Jai White for carrying the movie in a way that was believable and hilarious at the same time. With the conviction of Shaft, playing it just on the edge of a lampoon, he never dips you further than you need to go to get the joke and he never for a moment doesn’t believe that what he’s saying is completely and utterly true. So we believe, and laugh, along with him. It took a great casting director to find a woman to play along side him and they found that in Salli Richardson-Whitefield. Channeling a slightly softer Pam Grier she never winks at the camera, even when genuinely ridiculous things are happening around her.

Director Scott Sanders was in attendance at the screening and he spoke about his film with such ease and confidence that he made it look like making this movie was a breeze, but I strongly suspect this was not the case. Despite the fact that they found locations that needed little if anything done to them the crew of this film most certainly had their work cut out for them. Seamlessly creating a world set in the 70s with everything from the costumes to the set decoration to the colours of the film could have been no easy feat. There was never a moment when I was jarred out of the film by an object that was not period or couldn’t have existed at the time, in fact, just the opposite. I was occasionally distracted by how well this movie was put together. Truly something to marvel at, especially when the rest of the package is just as good, if not better.

I can honestly say that this is the most fun I’ve had in a theatre in a long, long time. This movie isn’t a cult classic, it’s just a classic and I can not recommend it highly enough to pretty much everyone. Black Dynamite opens October 16, 2009 and if you’re not there, you’re most certainly square.

Toronto After Dark runs from August 14 to 21, 2009 at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. Click here for our coverage. Click here for our Q&A footage from after the screening.

Tagged as: festivals, toronto after dark 2009