Remake moves to Atlanta, leaves behind street dealing
The grungy, fairly entertaining remake of “Superfly” borrows a few key narrative hooks from the 1972 original, along with key elements of its fantastic Curtis Mayfield soundtrack (notably “Pusherman”). But for better or worse, the new version has no interest in fashioning the same sort of mashup of blaxploitation and film noir that Gordon Parks Jr. created.
The new “Superfly” moves the action from Harlem to Atlanta, with a side trip to Juarez, Mexico. When the visual preoccupations aren’t slow-motion drug cartel mass murders, they lean into pure, leering hip-hop male fantasy. Every time anyone rolls up to a new club or some high roller’s suburban mansion, a dozen partygoers are making the Jacksons and the hundos rain, while anonymous, barely clothed young women a la the Busta Rhymes/Nicki Minaj “Twerk It” video get their close-up. Parts of them do, anyway.
The man behind that video, and many more, goes by the name Director X, and he directed the new “Superfly.” No longer a street-level hustler and cocaine user, the 2018model Youngblood Priest is a clean-living, multifaceted businessman. He moves his product in ever-morelucrative amounts with his partner Eddie (Jason Mitchell); he invests in an art gallery run by his lover Georgia; and, in a caring, community-minded way, he keeps tabs on every corner of Atlanta’s criminal activity, from the mayor’s office to the dirty cops on the force.
Georgia (Lex Scott Davis, doing wonders with a nothing role) is one-third of a menage a trois. Priest’s love life constitutes a stable triangle of pleasure. This we learn in a slow-mo shower sequence of extreme soft-porn sensitivity, one-upping the ’72 film’s famous bathtub sex scene.
Elsewhere, the director’s penchant for slow-mo can get a little ridiculous, especially in the martial-arts kicks and medium-wattage car chases. I did, however, enjoy seeing a Confederate statue take a tumble when one vehicle met its fiery end.
If you can forget about the movie’s general moral vacuousness, the extremely uneven digital photography and the slavish devotion to designer assault weapons, many of them pearly white in sync with the cokepeddling gangsters known as Snow Patrol, the screenplay by “Watchmen” scribe Alex Tse keeps the shifting alliances and power plays in clever circulation. The cast’s overall effectiveness is mitigated somewhat by the pleasant but indistinct presence of Trevor Jackson (“Grown-ish”) as Priest, the superfly criminal with firm principles and “Morris Day-lookin’ hair.” Best of the bunch include Michael Kenneth Williams as Scatter, Priest’s mentor figure, sometime supplier and martial arts instructor, and especially Jason Mitchell, excellent in “Mudbound,” as the combustible partner Eddie.
In ’72, Ron O’Neal’s Priest said it: “I know it’s a rotten game, but it’s the only one The Man left us to play.” Even with the hero shattering the bones of a particularly slimy white cop on the take — conscious payback for any number of white-on-black police abuse incidents captured on video — in the remake, life’s too plush for anything to seem all that rotten.