The long-in-development Outlaw Johnny Black has been touted a spiritual sequel to the excellent 2009 Blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite, but a direct comparison won't be kind to the former. Where Dynamite was pacey, irreverent and overstuffed with wild ideas, Outlaw is a little ponderous, earnest and mostly wholesome.
Still funny, and entertaining, mind, and it comes by its earnestness honestly. Michael Jai White stars, directs, and co-writes with Byron Keith Minns, who also has a significant role; Their passion for the material is clear, and it's one of those movies you can tell people had a great time making. But it's about as different a spoof as you could imagine. It shows so much reverence and love for the genre that I think it works better as a light-hearted Western movie than as a send-up of one. It does deploy every now and then the sort of non-sequiturs, sharp observations and over-the top humour its predecessor traded in freely, but here they feel a little out of place.
Johnny Black (Jai White) is one of those cool, badass, slightly amoral antiheroes who roams the plains in the late nineteenth century hunting for vengeance - he's after the racist asshole who killed his father, one Brett Clayton (Chris Browning, effectively menacing).
He's got a literal bullet with his target's name on it, and as he rides into a town he signals to the town undertaker that his professional services will be needed before long. An excellent, very genre-savvy introduction. Black's there because he knows that the local bank will be hit by Clayton's gang. However, he intervenes to save a couple of Indians from a gang of hoodlums, and is soon running away from the law.
On the run and without a horse (the poor animal literally kicks the bucket, in a pretty funny throwaway visual gag), the outlaw's rescued by a pastor (Keith Minns) who's on his way to take over ministerial duties on the small mining town of Hope Springs and to meet up with a sweetheart he's been corresponding with for years. Things don't work out, and after the pastor is left for dead after an Indian attack, Black pulls a Sommersby and takes over his identity.
The plan is to fake it at Hope Springs until he can abscond with the church's money, but of course the complications start piling on quickly.
The first complication is Bessie, the pastor's sweetheart, played by Erica Ash - followed by her sister, Jessie (Anika Noni Rose), whom Black falls for almost immediately. But he's also expected to tend to the towns spiritual needs, something to which his temperament is humorously unsuited for. The other main complication is that the original pastor wasn't as dead as Black thought - after an uncomfortable, cringe-inducing farce with his Indian attackers (all the Indians in the movie are pointedly played by very conspicuous non-native Americans), the priest manages to make it to Hope Springs, where Black manages to coerce him to go along with his plan.
There's also the matter of local land baron Tom Sheally (Barry Bostwick), who knows there's oil near the pastor's house and is threatening to invoke WWRBBM (White Woman Raped By Black Man - an acronym which, hilariously, everyone in the movie knows well) to get a posse to come burn the town down unless he gets the deed to the land.
It's a slow-moving, classical plot that hinges on a very predictable spiritual awakening for the titular outlaw (who, to be fair, was never particularly evil to begin with). But it's carefully crafted and engaging enough that its earnestness actually becomes a strength; The scene where Black has a very public epiphany, spurred by memories of his father giving a sermon on forgiveness, is particularly effective and graceful.
Elsewhere, the movie slows to a standstill - there is absolutely no reason this film needed to be a hundred and thirty minutes long. It doesn't help that the tone is all over the place, with Airplane! style gags thrown in along with more character based- and extremely broad humour and shameless mugging to the camera. Some of said mugging is pretty funny, like when poor, heartbroken Bessie aggressively cries at Black. But there are some real stinkers mixed in, too.
The cast do a lot to elevate the material. Michael Jai White is one seriously charismatic dude, and he has crack comedic timing. Byron Keith Minns is also very funny, and the ensemble cast that the film has assembled is mostly excellent - whether it's a one-joke character like Bessie and Jessie's slow-witted brother (Eme Ikwuakor) or a more sympathetic, layered character like an ally played by Kevin Chapman.
Action-wise it does pretty well. There isn't a huge amount of it, but it does run the gamut: gunfights, a gratuitous bar brawl, horse falls, horse-dragging, and all the stunts you'd expect out of a true-blooded Western; You can tell the crew was itching to do a lot of these. There's also a little bit of martial arts, with a couple of very quick but cool demonstrations of Jai White's skills, and a very funny Jackie Chan-style slap/quickdraw fight.
The direction is unshowy and competent; Despite some nice scenery early on and some stylistic references like dramatic zooms, it's not a particularly visually appealing movie, which, just like not letting the martial arts run amuck, seems like a considered decision. By design, it works best as a slightly corny, meat-and-potatoes Western movie that just happens to have quite a few jokes thrown in.
No comments:
Post a Comment