Afros, brown leather jackets, fur coats: squint and this fantastic directorial debut from Juel Taylor, the writer of Creed II, could be a blaxploitation classic, sandwiched somewhere between Foxy Brown and Black Caesar. It requires a smattering of contemporary references to jolt us into the present for its bouncy, race-conscious sci-fi comedy, fashioned after Sorry to Bother You and Get Out.
The ostensibly low-life character list remains in the grindhouse, however. Fontaine (John Boyega) is a two-bit drug dealer tracking down an outstanding payment from Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), the 1995 Players’ Ball pimp of the year, when things get freaky.
How freaky? Well, Fontaine is shot and killed by a rival, only to return to life.
Joining forces with Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), a prostitute turned detective who is hoping that blockchain will offer her an escape from streetwalking, Fontaine and Charles wander into a trap house where a secret elevator leads to a laboratory peopled by strangely familiar faces.
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‘The phone would ring and it would be Mike Scott from the Waterboys or Bono from U2. Everyone wanted to talk to my father’
The Glen, the unspecified “wrong side of the tracks” domain where the trio live, buzzes with conspiracy theories. Frog (Leon Lamar), the old drunk who hovers around the local convenience store, cautions: “It’s in the water, Young Blood.”
Maybe. But there are many smoking guns. The local pastor fervently preaches acquiescence; the chicken at the local fried-food emporium makes customers howl with laughter. And then there’s the grape juice and the government goons.
The appealing chemistry of Parris, Boyega and Foxx cries out for a grown-up Coffy-style Nancy Drew spin-off. There’s a delicious turn, too, from a villainous Kiefer Sutherland.
Beneath the zany antics and pastiche aesthetics – Ken Seng’s cinematography knows all the fly moves – the satire has plenty of bite. There are disconcerting overlaps with such real-world scandals as the Tuskegee syphilis study. A soundtrack featuring Bootsy Collins, Alicia Myers, Diana Ross and a new remix of Erykah Badu’s Tyrone seals the deal.
– On limited cinema release and on Netflix from today
