‘SuperFly’ delivers in the end
“SuperFly” features a street gang with the worst sense of self-preservation in the history of filmmaking.
They dress head to toe in white clothing, have white guns, drive in flashy white cars and fill their white homes with white furniture — all to better accessorize with the white cocaine they’re selling. You could probably see them from outer space. And if all that’s not
enough to attract the attention of the narcotics police, they voluntarily call themselves “Snow Patrol.”
This reboot of the 1972 blaxploitation classic “Super Fly” journeys beyond the ridiculous, and into another cinematic dimension altogether. It lacks a moral center, and at times seems oblivious to the laughable things that are happening on screen. It’s also about 20 minutes too long.
And yet “SuperFly” is entertaining, period. The dialogue is fast and fun, and the sense of fashion is so pervasive that it occasionally distracts from the movie. Even the satchels chosen for the money drops seem as if they were meticulously picked for maximum style impact, all with hand stitching and rich buttery leather. Please ignore the next Elizabethan drama and remember “SuperFly” for the next round of costume design Academy Awards nominations.
“SuperFly” is a modernization of “Super Fly,” with some of the same characters and plot turns as the original directed by Gordon Parks Jr., which starred Ron O’Neal as drug dealer Youngblood Priest. Trevor Jackson is Priest in the new film, and he’s a bit too much of a humorless enigma to achieve O’Neal’s standard of cool. He occasionally looks more confused than confident.
But screenwriter Alex Tse, a graduate of Lowell High in San Francisco, provides his lead with an unlimited resource of profanely wise dialogue.
Music video pro Director X ensconces his lead with a gangster’s paradise that includes stunningly cool clothing and a casually introduced polygamous relationship. (Time will dull the finer plot points of “SuperFly.” I’m writing this 10 hours later and can’t recall with 100 percent certainty how it ended. But I will die remembering that there was a threesome filmed in a shower.)
As much as Jackson is the star of the film, Director X uses his powers to make the city of Atlanta the second lead, including a sampler platter of the city’s beauty and urban blight that recalls the location scouting in Baltimore for David Simon’s “The Wire” — filtered through the lens of a “Mission Impossible” movie. Every outdoor establishing shot seems as if it was filmed as the sun was going down or coming up. Atlanta rapper Big Boi adds to the authenticity, making an extended cameo as a corrupt but entertaining Atlanta mayor.
“SuperFly” begins with a few disarmingly engaging scenes in the criminal underworld but starts to drag by the middle of the film. There are three too many characters and five too many confusing turns, and Director X either doesn’t have the budget or experience to shoot a memorable action scene.
It seems as if all of the best secondary characters — including Michael K. Williams as an aging gangster and Andrea Londo as Priest’s ride-or-die second lover — disappear from the plot when they’re needed most. The big finish relies on huge logical leaps, mostly centered around a pair of comically corrupt police officers.
Even the Snow Patrol, so bright and full of promise, throwing their millions in drug money in the air at a strip club, start to look like they could use a nap.
And yet when the credits roll, audiences will take an inventory of all the preposterous things they’ve just witnessed, and feel pleasure. In the end, it feels as if both SuperFly and the audience got their money’s worth.