‘SUPERFLY’

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Director X’s “Superfly” transplants the 1972 Blaxploitation classic from Harlem streets to suburban Atlanta mansions, flips Curtis Mayfield’s soul score for Future’s hip-hop soundtrack and forsakes the original’s politically charged grit for shallow music-video indulgence.

“He’s got a plan to stick it to the man,” went the ads for Gordon Parks Jr.’s “Super Fly,” with Ron O’Neal as Youngblood Priest, the suave cocaine dealer trying to make one last score. Coming a year after “Shaft” (directed by Parks’ father), “Super Fly” was a post-civil-rights-era time capsule oozing antiauthoritarian fury and ‘70s style.

“The Man” is mostly MIA in this “Superfly,” which takes more after Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” and familiar hip-hop fantasies than anything channeled by the earlier Blaxploitation films. If snorted lines of coke were copious in the original, Director X’s “Superfly” is packed with scenes of slow-motion booty shaking.

This Youngblood Priest (Trevor Jackson) is a polished businessman who runs a well-established, clandestine drug business with his partner Eddie (Jason Mitchell). Financially savvy, deeply connected all over town and never rattled by the most lethal interactions, Jackson’s slickly coifed Priest is almost as much superhero as super fly. Jackson comfortably carries the film with a smooth panache, but his Priest — like the movie — doesn’t make much of an impression.

Yet “Superfly” is also a generally entertaining movie, with good things in it. Mitchell (“Mudbound”) is predictably excellent as Priest’s less scrupulous partner and friend; he’s the film’s high point. And any movie that casts Big Boi as the mayor of Atlanta has done some things right. (“Superfly” would be better if there was more of him in it.) And Jennifer Morrison, one of the two crooked police detectives in the film, is unexpectedly terrific in a usually stereotypical role.

But it feels like the reason for remaking “Super

Fly” got lost along the way.

Comparing the two versions of “Super Fly” — one in two words, the other just one — only illustrates what movies can lose by over-glamourizing themselves. “Superfly” makes one belated stab at relevance in a shakedown scene with a corrupt white cop that speaks to today’s Black Lives Matter protests. (In the 1972 original, it was white cops supplying the cocaine that poisoned the black community.) But even that moment is a reminder of how much genuine angst and emotion “Super Fly” could have tapped into.

Starring: Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Lex Scott Davis (Violence and language throughout, strong sexuality, nudity and drug content.) — Jake Coyle, The Associated Press