Artists and Actress featured in Superfly: Rick Ross, Jason Mitchell, Trevor Jackson, Jennifer Morrison, Big Boi and produced by: Future
Lex Scott Davis and Trevor Jackson in SuperflyOh yes, as the Three 6 Mafia song goes, it’s hard out here for a pimp. Especially when your name is Priest (Trevor Jackson) and you’re a philosopher pimp (you say, “No car can ever outrun fate”) who wants to make an enormous cocaine deal with the Mexican cartels, but you’re pursued by rival gangsters collectively known as Snow Patrol (“Light up, light up/ As if you have a choice . . .”) and your only soulmates are two former “bitches” with whom you share a cringeworthy slo-mo threesome midway through the movie.
Oh yes, women are “bitches” here, but that’s OK, because they are mostly anonymous and shot from the waist down, in thongs, with their “fine asses” filling the screen (“Y’all wanna see some ass?” is one of the very first lines, and might have been the tagline too).
The
film is a profoundly moronic reboot of the 1972 blaxploitation classic.
It’s made by the Canadian pop promo veteran Director X, who sounds like
a crusading civil-rights campaigner and not just a hack director who
can’t seem to differentiate between the strip-club aesthetics of a rap
video and the demands of a full-length feature film.
15, 116min
15, 116min
Director X, the Canadian film and music video filmmaker at the helm of Superfly, has done everything in his power to enliven this glossy action-crime-thriller, but it remains a strangely hollow, laborious affair.
This remake of the 1972 blaxploitation movie Super Fly has moved the action from Harlem to present-day Atlanta, with fresh-faced singer and actor Trevor Jackson stepping into the shoes of Youngblood Priest, a powerful drug kingpin who has been working the streets since he was a child.
The almost two-hour running time, of which you feel every minute crawl by, plays out like an extended gangster rap music video with about the same level of gravitas. Dollar bills rain, women are generally treated like accessories for their men, the cars are shiny and fast and the costumes are outrageously lavish.
