Urban Thought Collective

Contemporary action star takes on ‘70s action persona.
Presented by Electronic Urban Report.

by Kenya M. Yarbrough

*Actor Michael Jai White is hoping to make a big explosion at theaters this weekend. He stars in and wrote the action comedy “Black Dynamite” opening this weekend in limited release.

“Black Dynamite” is the story of a 1970s African-American action legend of the same name who takes on The Man to fight for the community.

“There’s been tremendous reaction,” White said of the screenings of the film. “It’s even been more so in other countries. I think it’s the fact that we have an action-type of hero; a non-politically correct hero that’s a different hue is really resonating. We got a standing ovation in Prague, tremendous responses in Germany, France, and Australia and just recently in Brazil. Very much like the onset of these movies – when you had ‘Shaft’ and ‘Superfly’ – people responded. I think it was an alternative to the Charles Bronsons and Clint Eastwoods. You had a different kind of hero that you could be for an hour and a half; a different type of charisma and swagger.”

The film has the look, feel, cinematography, sound and imagery of the classic 70s movies with the strong, aggressive black star; the type of film that came to be a fixture in the blaxploitation era, an era that has been a debatable issue in the African American culture.

“It’s unfortunate that that term blaxploitation kind of blanketed over a lot of movies, which could have easily been called urban action films,” White said, who watched the final cut with urban action star Jim Brown. “‘The Mack’ is a great dramatic piece. There are a number of movies like that. Being that it was the first time that we saw ourselves as something more than butlers and porters and maids in the movies. We had Jim Brown being an action star. I felt like back then our heroes were judged on the same criteria as the white heroes.”

White commented that approximately 300 so-called “blaxploitation” movies were made in the span of four years when the film houses discovered that they made so much revenue.

“That blaxploitation era saved the studios,” he said. “Here were movies they could finance for an eighth of a normal budget that would get people in the theaters. So then they started exploiting it and they just started churning out any kind of movie. Understandably people got fed up with it because they started getting ridiculous and unfortunately those ridiculous movies started to speak for a lot of them that weren’t; that really offered social commentary.”

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