#Superfly 2018 movie movie#
They’re led by the roly-poly, hard-as-rusty-nails Q (Big Bank Black), the closest thing this movie has to an authentic hoodlum, but it’s when Priest is attacked by Q’s hothead-sociopath protégé, Juju (Kaalan “KR” Walker), that he realizes the time has come for him to take the money and run. He also has a run-in with the Snow Patrol, a rival crew of coke dealers who dress in white. In the opening sequence, set at a throbbing nightclub, he establishes his dominion by publicly humiliating a street-cred rapper who owes him money. Priest, whose real power is information (he’s got it on everyone), is surrounded by player-predators who are less cunning but more crudely violent than he is. It holds your attention yet leaves you with nothing. Shot in a functional, slammed-together manner that’s less sensually stylish than you’d expect from a music-video auteur, the film is a competent yet glossy and hermetic street-hustle drug thriller, less a new urban myth than a lavishly concocted episode. The hero of “Superfly” certainly has the right to be a stud, but the difference between the two movies is that the new version, directed by the Canadian-born hip-hop video veteran Julian Christian Lutz (who bills himself as Director X, a moniker that seems caught between black nationalism and “What’s My Line?”), has no resonance, no real atmosphere, and almost no social context. His Priest is controlled and invincible, a leonine street king with two girlfriends, one African-American (Lex Scott Davis) and one Latina (Andrea Londo) when he takes a shower with both of them, it’s a misty porny daydream that ends as an erotic Pietà.
He isn’t a bad actor, but it’s not like he finds many gradations within a young hustler’s survivalist pout.
Jackson is only 21 (O’Neal, when he played Priest, was 34), but he beats the holy crap out of people, fires pistols with gangsta heartlessness, and at one point even dodges a bullet, never losing his cool. T had a baby and dressed him in the sleekest of designer leather, he might look like this guy.
#Superfly 2018 movie plus#
As Priest, a coke dealer who has built a business while taking great care to remain under the police radar, Trevor Jackson, from “Eureka” and “American Crime,” sports a jutting abundance of luxurious inky silken flat hair, marked by an elegant slice of a part, plus a highly manicured beard, a pirate earring, and a pretty-boy scowl. The new “ Superfly” transplants the tale to the swank environs of contemporary upscale Atlanta, and it gives its hero the 21st-century equivalent of O’Neal’s processed-pimp look.