Viking Night: Super Fly
By Bruce Hall
August 16, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
One of the reasons is the help. Any self respecting pimp needs a cadre of loyal henchmen to work the town and bring in the Benjamins. But the streets won’t give it up easy, so you use tough guys who don’t mind getting their hands dirty. It’s hard work but it’s still not as hard as being a pimp - so you’re advised to find unambitious meatheads for this detail. As any Bond Villain can tell you, thick headed lemmings are a dime a dozen and they’re usually willing to work for peanuts. But they’re also usually kind of dumb, so you have to word instructions very carefully around them. And believe me, the price you really pay for cheap labor is in quality of execution. Sometimes, you have to remind your boys to pay you your damn money every month, and that’s annoying - because a pimp’s gotta eat.
This is where Priest Youngblood (Ron O’Neal) comes in. I guess I should stop and point out the fact that Priest is not actually a pimp. He’s a cocaine dealer; I just think "pimp" sounds funnier. Whatever the case, he has a problem with the help, as one of his low budget meatheads named Fat Freddie seems to be a little short this month. Priest warns Fat Freddie to have the money by nightfall or bad things will happen to his girlfriend. Do you see how it is? It’s not even noon and he’s had to beat the hell out of a man and might have to put an innocent woman out on the streets. Priest is a hard one, but don’t hate him. He’s got a hard job. What he doesn’t know is that it’s about to get harder - putting the screws to Fat Freddie will cost him big later. But right now, Priest and his partner Eddie (Carl Lee) have it all – money, drugs, wine and women. Life is good.
Priest wants out, though. He may not have an education but he’s smart enough to know that nothing lasts forever, and that a drug dealer’s career can only end one way. So he presents Eddie with a plan to retire from the business free and clear. They’ll parlay their savings into a one time, million dollar coke deal and get the hell out. Eddie reluctantly agrees, once he’s confident he won’t be asked to sacrifice his high standard of living - a pimp’s got to have standards. So the two men take their Big Idea to the only man in New York who can make it happen, Priest’s mentor and father figure, Scatter (Julius Harris). Scatter is a retired pimp and now has a respectable job cooking three star meals at the Pimp Club, where all the pimps go to unwind after a long, hard day of pimp related activity. Scatter has worked long and hard to get out of the business and no longer wants any part of this young man’s game.
He doesn’t that is, until Priest opens up a 55 gallon drum of guilt on the man who taught him everything he knows. They came up together in the same neighborhood. Priest is just trying to get out and go straight; can’t Scatter understand this? Of course it works; otherwise we’d have no movie. And as they begin phase one of The Plan, of course things don’t go as planned because again, we’d have no movie. It turns out that Fat Freddie was under so much pressure to produce that he gets sloppy. Now the cops, the mafia and everyone else in town are wise to Priest’s gambit and they all want a piece of the action. It’s not just hard to be a pimp; it’s hard for a pimp to retire, too. The more Priest tries to get out, the more they all keep pulling him back in.
On paper, this doesn’t look like a bad story. Super Fly has all the makings of a top notch made for basic cable potboiler, if not a major motion picture. It’s got honorable dope dealers, corrupt cops, deceit, betrayal, and intrigue. It has racial oppression. It has a live performance by the Curtis Mayfield Experience. It has Pimp Cars. It has a hooker with a heart of gold. It has one of the most unintentionally hilarious, awkward and disturbing love scenes I’ve seen in any movie, of any rating. The only thing it doesn’t have is Michael Bay on horseback, wrapped in Christmas lights, screaming through a bullhorn as he blows up an entire city block for no reason. There’s really an incredible amount of stuff going on here, and that’s exactly what weighs the whole damn thing down.
There just isn’t a sufficient level of technical competence behind this film to make it truly work. The direction is over cooked and amateurish. The sound editing is so bad – so very, very bad - that I’m actually pretty sure I could have done it better myself. Terrible dialogue sounds even more terrible when it’s delivered terribly, and this movie is deeply afflicted on both counts. A lot of people won’t like hearing that, or will say that it doesn’t matter. Super Fly enjoys its cult status in part because so many people fail to realize that it was more influential than good. And don’t expect me to give it a pass for being a genre picture. Not all so-called “blaxploitation” films were bad ones. And if maximizing your message (and your profit) by catering to a specific audience is a crime, I guess Spike Lee, Tyler Perry and the Wayans Brothers are all criminals.
Actually…they are. But that’s an argument for another day.
Super Fly is simply a bad movie. The climactic fight scene looks like they just filmed a bunch of drunks to slap fight in front of a camera. The dialogue is high school Thanksgiving play bad. The film generates several significant subplots during its 90 minute run which are dropped and never again addressed. It’s like a patchwork of lukewarm dramatic sketches instead of a coherent story. It’s as though someone important died halfway through filming but they decided to finish the thing anyway. And yet the movie really does have an interesting core narrative. A drug dealer sees his life as a dead end and tries to get out, only to be thwarted at every turn by parasites who aren’t ready to let their cash cow out to pasture. Plus, there are a handful of surprisingly heartfelt performances that keep me from dismissing Super Fly as just another craptastic low budget thriller.
Priest got his start thanks to a leg up from Scatter, and is now approaching his mentor for another hand out so he can retire. His main girlfriend - the only honest person he knows - reminds him that a good man doesn’t need a million dollars to walk away from a life of crime. But Priest disagrees, because he doesn’t want to have to work for a living. He’s just a spoiled brat who wants to take his ball and go home because he found out it’s hard to be a pimp. and you want badly to judge him for this but you really can’t. Thanks to O’Neal’s surprisingly sympathetic portrayal, you get the idea that Priest already knows what he is and isn’t any happier with it than you are. Sometimes the right guy gets cast for the right part at the right time, and despite his acute lack of talent it works. And sometimes, it even becomes legendary. Simply put, Ron O’Neal was NOT a good actor but he WAS Super Fly - and you were not. Can you dig it?
Similarly, Carl Lee has one of the best scenes in the film when Eddie starts having second thoughts about the Plan and bares his soul to Priest. Maybe they’re fooling themselves. Maybe they belong at the bottom of the barrel. Maybe self improvement is a pipe dream. Sometimes the easy road is the wrong way to go but just as often, doing the right thing will get you killed too. Watching both men go in different directions with the same struggle turns out to be more effective than you’d expect. Julius Harris does a good job of making Scatter seem less like a hardened killer and more like your uncle Phil who was a good guy, but could never stop betting on horses. None of these are legendary performances - but they add critical depth, and they make you feel more invested in this movie than you should.
And then there’s the soundtrack. You just can’t talk about Super Fly without mentioning Curtis Mayfield’s brilliant score. His music literally makes the movie come alive and like the film itself, it served as an easy template for countless imitators. Like Purple Rain or Footloose, you may find yourself listening to songs from the movie long after you’ve lost track of the movie itself. In fact, just watch Super Fly with your eyes closed, and provided you have an appropriately vintage sound system and wardrobe to go with it, you’ll probably enjoy it. Maybe that’s the best way to appreciate this movie. Just immerse yourself in it from a distance, and let the inferior parts assemble themselves into a satisfying whole.
Go ahead and roll your eyes at the dialogue. There are a quarter million words in the English language but it seems like only 50 of them ever get used. It’s fantastic the way this movie unintentionally highlights this. Laugh at the wild clothes, and pretend you wouldn’t wear a calfskin leisure suit if you had one - and could fit into it. Raise your eyebrows at the racial tension that saturates the story. Hatred is hard to kill but it doesn’t take bullets, it takes brains - the one weapon everyone has but nobody likes to use. Super Fly’s attempts to frame Priest’s dilemma in this way are weak, but noteworthy nonetheless, because the struggle is still out there. So put your feet up, put your arm around someone, and make sure you’ve poured yourself a Courvoisier. Enjoy Super Fly the way it was intended and you’ll get the message. The more you have, the more you have to lose - that’s exactly why it’s hard to be a pimp, baby. Real hard.