SUPERFLY 2018 MOVIE
"Priest," as surnames go, is wholly appropriate the movie opens with him intimidating a guy into paying up by pointing out that he knows where the guy goes to church. They may look squeaky-clean, but it’s Priest who’s spotless. Even their massive stockpile of guns is suited for a snow-camouflaged shootout in the Swiss Alps, like something out of a dumb spy movie. Which is how, in a pivot from the original, we get a rival crew on Priests’s tail who call themselves the Snow Patrol-so-named because they dress themselves head to toe in all-white everything: furs, jeans, Lamborghinis. Its lapses into political territory aren’t an excuse to adapt a serious tone, but rather a chance to morph into a crime fantasy in which the black protagonist will prevail. What’s intriguing, and occasionally even thrilling, about Director X’s movie is that it’s also as unabashedly cheesy as the original. Here, there’s a black man (played by Big Boi) running for mayor, and crooks are as wary of getting caught by clubgoers on their cell-phone cameras as they are of direct encounters with the police. Williams), but the cartel lord Adalberto Gonzalez ( Esai Morales)-because a modern audience would be hip to where Priest is ultimately getting his cocaine. In the new movie, Priest’s main supplier isn’t his mentor, Scatter (played this time around by Michael K. There’s still a gleeful montage of Priest’s crew wheeling and dealing their product, still a steamy bathroom sex scene, still the same stylish deployment of soul and R&B (including a well-placed needle drop of Curtis Mayfield’s “ Pusherman,” which was written for the original movie).īut modern touches fill in the margins. Durkin), starts shouting as if in the midst of an altercation with the unarmed Freddy and his girlfriend, and with that as his cover, he shoots them both-fatally.Īnd so, you get a movie that hits many of the same notes as the original. One of the dirty cops, Officer Turk Franklin ( Brian F. They know this new Superfly is bound to end with a bit of police brutality-and so it does. Do I even need to describe it? Director X and his writer, Alex Tse, know what’s going to come to mind for a modern, primarily black audience when they see police lights a’blazing. The Fat Freddy of the new movie is killed after his police interview, too, but it’s no accident. A tragic accident-memorable, mostly, for its schlocky shock value. After getting questioned, he tries to flee the cops, runs into the street, and gets hit by a car. In the original Super Fly, starring the legendary, indescribably cool Ron O’Neal, the henchman Fat Freddie gets picked up by the police and, as in the new version, gets squeezed until he gives up Priest’s name.
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Like Priest, you sense the eminent downfall.
SUPERFLY 2018 SERIES
So when his disgruntled muscle, Fat Freddy ( Jacob Ming-Trent), begs for a chance to sell a key of cocaine, then immediately gets pulled over by a dirty cop and is forced to give up Priest’s name, you get the feeling it’s the first in a series of steps toward tragedy. He isn’t even on the cops’ radar-and he’d like to keep it that way.
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Youngblood Priest ( Trevor Jackson), the cocaine dealer and hustler from Atlanta, has never been to jail. Police lights are never a good sign in a gangster movie, but in Superfly-music-video master Director X’s soapy, stimulating remake of the 1972 blaxploitation classic-the sight is doubly ominous.