In general, parodies only work if the creator loves whatever is being parodied (mocking that hate is satire).
That's certainly true of "Black Dynamite," a loving homage to the low production values of the blaxploitation genre.
Its star and co-writer, Michael Jai White, clearly sat down with a stack of DVDs and a notepad, and the result is the finest parody film since Shaun of the Dead.
White plays Black Dynamite a combination of Richard Roundtree and Jim Kelly, a street savior dedicated to keeping the ghetto clean who just so happens to know kung fu.
When the mob kills his brother, however, all hell breaks loose.
BD gets what information he can from his old CIA buddy-cum-policeman O'Leary (according to the plaque on his desk, he has neither a title nor a first name), though most of their conversations involve hysterically over-expository background details of their time in 'Nam.
With the perfunctory warning that O'Leary won't tolerate a street war no matter how close their bond, Black Dynamite leaves the station and, without hesitation, starts a street war.
White, 41, has been a character actor for years, with a resume that's bound to include at least one film you've seen, though I can't match the same face across any two of them.
With "Black Dynamite," though, he has a role that will finally turn him into a recognizable star. Though the ghetto looks upon him as a hero, BD is given to mood swings and outbursts, and more than once he explodes in righteous fury at the slightest mention of orphans.
Director Scott Sanders appears to be having just as much fun as White: the camera often blurs or lingers on a close-up long after the actor has finished speaking.
A boom mic dips so low into frame that White stops in the middle of a line to stare at it.
When Black Dynamite leaps up into one of his fiery speeches of civic outrage, the camera belatedly tilts to follow the action, then overshoots and must lower again.
With the dialogue containing some sort of joke in almost every line and the visual style layering jokes onto the words, not a minute of the film fails to elicit at least one laugh.
At the end of the first hour, however, "Black Dynamite" goes from a first-rate genre parody into a broader farce involving a conspiracy on the part of the Man to bring down the black community.
I won't comment too much on this section as it would involve major spoilers, but suffice to say as funny as the last half hour is, the second lacks the cohesion of the preceded.
Nevertheless, you have to give points for originality, and anyone who tells you he saw it coming is a bald-faced liar.
"Black Dynamite" certainly doesn't have any lessons to impart to the viewing audience.
I don't know if, uproarious as it was, anything in it was as parodic as a POV shot in the original Shaft in which a man attempts to strangle the camera as if it was Shaft and you can plainly see his thumbs grip the rectangular frame of the camera.
But it's filled to the brim with jokes, in-jokes and metajokes that warrant and reward multiple viewings. Heck, you'll need to see it again just to catch what you didn't hear while you were laughing at the previous gag.
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