This movie, as noted above, suffers from being overly preachy and inchoate. There's also a disturbing amount of "dead" footage that should have been left on the editing room floor.** spoilers ahead ** Anyway, the core of the film revolves around Johnny Johnson's (Billy Dee Williams) desires to "stick to the man".
Unfortunately, they never really do an adequate job of convincing the viewer (in my case anyway) that Johnny has it rough enough that he should foment a riot and kill people. Sure, he's passed over for a job that he's qualified for, and he's arrested by the cops for no reason... but other than that, his life seems to be pretty decent. In fact, he spends the majority of one day going to a party, dancing with a hot lady, going out to eat, buying some clothes, then making sweet love to the aforementioned lady. If that's indicative of "the man" keeping you down, then sign me up! The narrative is told via a largely confusing series of flashbacks that don't make a whole lot of sense -- primarily because a character will flashback to incidents/people that they weren't even a party to. For example, Luanna (Pamela Jones) asks Johnny to explain a comment he made during a conversation that she couldn't possibly been privy to. About half-way through the movie I simply stopped trying to make sense of it.Like most of the movies I comment on, I was hoping this was going to be in the "so good it's bad" category. While it was close, it falls short of true ineptitude... which is my way of saying the movie wasn't that bad (though it wasn't that good either).
October 16, 2009
