This is important, as it should give you a clue to how sequels can go wrong. I remember taking my shapely-legged date to this one. We entered the movie theater hand-in-hand and were expecting big things from this sequel to SUPER FLY.
Sometimes I think I should have smelled what was cooking from the title alone. The film, due to higher production values, started out as something comparable to a Bond film because of its European trappings. We remember the look of steely confidence on the faces of the lead actors, Sheila Frazier and Ron O'Neal, now riding high off the sensational success of SUPER FLY and no doubt expecting more of the same to follow. We settled in for the promise of a good evening to come.
Everything started out fine. There were glimpses of that Olympic track running by O'Neal from the prior film in this one. The poker game was reminiscent of the ending of SUPER FLY, and we expected it foreshadowed an even more 'wow' finish when we finally got to the end. And nobody figured on that stirring monologue that Priest Youngblood gives in front of a Casino Fountain that posits him as some kind of Ghetto Hamlet doing Shakespeare in the Park! So far everybody is rolling with this...
Roscoe Lee Browne encounters Youngblood and does his African statesman riff as Doctor Lamine Sonko, and it looks like we have a mentor and father figure for Youngblood comparable to Julius W. Harris' Scatter. Check and double-check. That is when the T.N.T. part kicks in and proves particularly prophetic.
There are some reviewers who thought that this film moved too slow, but the pace seemed fine to us. No, the way I reason it out, the problems to T.N.T. were to be found elsewhere; and actually had more to do with the original shortcomings of the first film. The fact is we know very little about Priest Youngblood, and it would appear that after T.N.T., there ain't much more to be known. Priest does not reflect on the death of Scatter or the betrayal of his best friend, Eddie, even though that would add depth to his back story. Doctor Lamine Sonko is questionably the only scintilla of a reference to Black History but besides one stirring, angry speech to Priest, fails to share anymore 'fun facts' with him about his cultural heritage.
People talk about 'back story' all the time, and because of cinema's emphasis and accent on the visual, this is something that has to be deftly handled. The absence or presence of it makes all the difference between a mere exercise in sensationalism and something that has a bit more substance to it. What was a revelation to me is that 'front story' is something that can be just as important as 'back story', and sometimes even more important in some narratives.
Now in SUPER FLY, Priest Youngblood just wanted to get out of 'the life'. He wanted 'freedom from' being owned by his 'white oppressors'. But I once read that 'freedom from' isn't much good unless there something to be 'free to'. Getting out of one life isn't much of an advancement unless there is another new and better life to get into. None of this is adequately explored in T.N.T.
Nobody expected a coke sniffing drug dealer to have some grand soaring vision of deliverance. But his humble groping towards it through a facade of ghetto macho posturing was what made Priest such an arresting character. This search for a 'front story' or a vision the main characters can strive towards and help forge, like Priest's girlfriend Georgia did for him in the first film, should have been more fully satisfied by the arrival of Doctor Lamine Sonko as yet another step in the continuum.
Now past these moot points to the ending or what I referred to as the RESOLUTION in my book of movie reviews TOWARD A NEW CINEMA. It was the way SUPER FLY T.N.T. resolved it's story that made the audience, as well as me and my date, go 'AWWWW' with a visceral sense of disappointment. Everything was actually building up fine until we came to the ending. Somehow, it lacked the scope and scale of Priest's confrontation with Deputy Commissioner Reardon in the first film, or the overwhelming sense that the main protagonist has somehow taken command of the situation in no uncertain terms using his wits and intelligence from a plausible ghetto perspective. There was no sense of having bested the High and the Mighty and rocked the White Power Structure in some form or fashion. This, despite the fact that Ron O'Neal did a fine job in his directorial debut and Alex Haley, of ROOTS and MALCOLM X renown, wrote a fascinating script from O'Neal's story.
I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if Deputy Commissioner Reardon had tracked down the killers Priest hired, and either liquidated them or offered to pay them two or three times as much to take out SUPER FLY.
This might have made an interesting opening scene or EXPOSITION. Perhaps then there would have been more to T.N.T.
Sometimes I think I should have smelled what was cooking from the title alone. The film, due to higher production values, started out as something comparable to a Bond film because of its European trappings. We remember the look of steely confidence on the faces of the lead actors, Sheila Frazier and Ron O'Neal, now riding high off the sensational success of SUPER FLY and no doubt expecting more of the same to follow. We settled in for the promise of a good evening to come.
Everything started out fine. There were glimpses of that Olympic track running by O'Neal from the prior film in this one. The poker game was reminiscent of the ending of SUPER FLY, and we expected it foreshadowed an even more 'wow' finish when we finally got to the end. And nobody figured on that stirring monologue that Priest Youngblood gives in front of a Casino Fountain that posits him as some kind of Ghetto Hamlet doing Shakespeare in the Park! So far everybody is rolling with this...
Roscoe Lee Browne encounters Youngblood and does his African statesman riff as Doctor Lamine Sonko, and it looks like we have a mentor and father figure for Youngblood comparable to Julius W. Harris' Scatter. Check and double-check. That is when the T.N.T. part kicks in and proves particularly prophetic.
There are some reviewers who thought that this film moved too slow, but the pace seemed fine to us. No, the way I reason it out, the problems to T.N.T. were to be found elsewhere; and actually had more to do with the original shortcomings of the first film. The fact is we know very little about Priest Youngblood, and it would appear that after T.N.T., there ain't much more to be known. Priest does not reflect on the death of Scatter or the betrayal of his best friend, Eddie, even though that would add depth to his back story. Doctor Lamine Sonko is questionably the only scintilla of a reference to Black History but besides one stirring, angry speech to Priest, fails to share anymore 'fun facts' with him about his cultural heritage.
People talk about 'back story' all the time, and because of cinema's emphasis and accent on the visual, this is something that has to be deftly handled. The absence or presence of it makes all the difference between a mere exercise in sensationalism and something that has a bit more substance to it. What was a revelation to me is that 'front story' is something that can be just as important as 'back story', and sometimes even more important in some narratives.
Now in SUPER FLY, Priest Youngblood just wanted to get out of 'the life'. He wanted 'freedom from' being owned by his 'white oppressors'. But I once read that 'freedom from' isn't much good unless there something to be 'free to'. Getting out of one life isn't much of an advancement unless there is another new and better life to get into. None of this is adequately explored in T.N.T.
Nobody expected a coke sniffing drug dealer to have some grand soaring vision of deliverance. But his humble groping towards it through a facade of ghetto macho posturing was what made Priest such an arresting character. This search for a 'front story' or a vision the main characters can strive towards and help forge, like Priest's girlfriend Georgia did for him in the first film, should have been more fully satisfied by the arrival of Doctor Lamine Sonko as yet another step in the continuum.
Now past these moot points to the ending or what I referred to as the RESOLUTION in my book of movie reviews TOWARD A NEW CINEMA. It was the way SUPER FLY T.N.T. resolved it's story that made the audience, as well as me and my date, go 'AWWWW' with a visceral sense of disappointment. Everything was actually building up fine until we came to the ending. Somehow, it lacked the scope and scale of Priest's confrontation with Deputy Commissioner Reardon in the first film, or the overwhelming sense that the main protagonist has somehow taken command of the situation in no uncertain terms using his wits and intelligence from a plausible ghetto perspective. There was no sense of having bested the High and the Mighty and rocked the White Power Structure in some form or fashion. This, despite the fact that Ron O'Neal did a fine job in his directorial debut and Alex Haley, of ROOTS and MALCOLM X renown, wrote a fascinating script from O'Neal's story.
I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if Deputy Commissioner Reardon had tracked down the killers Priest hired, and either liquidated them or offered to pay them two or three times as much to take out SUPER FLY.
This might have made an interesting opening scene or EXPOSITION. Perhaps then there would have been more to T.N.T.