Mark Reviews Movies: SUPERFLY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 12, 2018

Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly had grit, personality, and moral complexity. Director X's Superfly has polish, attitude, and a few generic action sequences. It's one thing to update a movie for modern sensibilities. It's an entirely other thing to miss the point of what you're remaking.

The biggest shift between the 1972 original and this remake is one of tone. Parks' film was all about desperation—the protagonist cocaine dealer who's convinced that he's not long for this world if he stays in the game much longer, his assorted underlings who believe they can make more money than they could have dreamed of if they go along with his plan, the addicts who attack our hero for some quick cash and set him off on his quest for freedom. It understood that its protagonist is both a victim—of a system that drove him to his profession and doesn't want him to rise above it—and a victimizer—of his henchmen, who feel the need to exact violence and have it exacted against them for him, and the people who get high on his supply.

There's no such complexity to this iteration of Priest (Trevor Jackson), a cocaine dealer in Atlanta. One imagines him watching the original film and taking the outfits, the scenes of prosperity, the trafficking of drugs, and the clever cons as the sole lessons. This Priest is a smooth operator, always two steps ahead of his competition—be it a rival gang, a Mexican drug cartel, or a couple of crooked cops—and enjoying the hustle.

He's almost too good at his work. There's never a sense of tension to his actions, and if not for the fact that he occasionally says he wants out of the business, we might be forgiven for thinking that Priest has found his true calling, as destructive as it might be.

The basics of the plot remain unchanged. Priest has a close call and decides to get out of the game. To do so, he plans to sell one final, much larger stash of cocaine, using the profits to escape to a quiet life.

Alex Tse's screenplay does substantially increase the complications. There's a local gang, called Sno Patrol and led by Q (Big Bank Black). Juju (Kaalan "KR" Walker), a member of that crew, is envious of Priest's success. The young guy tries to kill Priest (but shoots an innocent bystander, who turns out to be fine, because collateral damage, apparently, would add too much uncomfortable realism). In retaliation, Priest's right-hand guys Eddie (Jason Mitchell) and Freddy (Jacob Ming-Trent) shoot at some Sno Patrol members (A scene at a funeral parlor shows the price of this life—a white coffin with gold handles).

Other complications include Priest going around Scatter (Michael Kenneth Williams), his usual cocaine supplier, and taking his offer directly to Adalberto Gonzalez (Esai Morales), the head of a cartel in Juarez who wants to show that he's the smart one of the family business. Later, a corrupt detective named Mason (Jennifer Morrison) and a murderous cop named Franklin (Brian Durkin) want a piece of Priest's profits.

The cops add a certain political bent to the story. It was present in the original film, of course, but a scene in which the crooked cop orchestrates a murder to look like a justifiable act has a bite that's more specific than the 1972 film's aura of corruption. The political atmosphere has and hasn't changed much in between the first film and this remake, but it's strange how Tse and X raise issues such as police corruption, only to have them sink into the background of the plot. One particularly effective, if quite over-the-top, moment comes at the climax of a car chase, in which the filmmakers get rid of two birds with one stone—a villain crashing into and taking down a monument of a Confederate figure.

Otherwise, the movie is all complicated plotting and hollow style. Priest comes across as a shallow icon of the excesses of his particular American Dream, living in a big house with two women (played by Lex Scott Davis and Andrea Londo), who are more than eager to share him during a shower, and driving fancy cars and dressing to the nines. A couple of flashbacks—one the voice of his mother and the other a full scene—exist primarily to prop up Priest's own legend, getting into crime to support his mom and knowing from a young age that information is power.

He's rewarded for his cleverness, which we only fully understand at the end, and his refusal to start a fight, which seems like a pretty low bar. Superfly mostly goes along by indulging in this fantasy, in which a life devoted to money, drugs, and violence only has consequences for the people who deserve them.

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