Black

This movie is not entirely an action movie. It's not a fantasy either. It's a weird hybrid, that might leave people confused, about how they should feel about it. I watched it at the Fright Fest in London and liked it. Despite it's late hour showing (which got even later, due to an unplanned screening of something else), the movie still was great. I could hold my attention, despite me and others being really tired and held us til the end.

There are many action scenes in this movie, but there is also a lot of supernatural things going on. The main actor is really strong (in his performance) and almost everybody else falls in his shadow. A movie that bears a second (or more) viewing!

Well, if we could divide a movie into two parts, then the first part of this French movie is just great. But the 2nd part of this movie, once the background scene moved to Africa, it gradually evolved into an absurd and bizarre dark continent mambo-jumbo, so crazy that human beings would become lion, panther and python...a snake man. An almost perfect and thrilling bank heist movie turned 180 degrees and became a dragging and ridiculous street firefight.

There is a funny scene in this movie that an original hush-hush whisper could be bloated into a huge rumor. A small bag of precious stones could gradually become 20 kilos diamonds from mouth to mouth, ear to ear.

This is a big shame and living example that a movie could be better and even great, but regretfully lost focus and turned itself into an absurd farce.

Despite the low rating this movie has on IMDb, I decided to watch it anyway. Still, I could have not and nothing would have been bad in this. The first hour is quite distracting, following the chase-for-a-better-plan of a young black french felon going back to his roots in Senegal, only motivated by the opportunity to rob a ton of raw diamonds from a typically African bank, i.e. an easy job, without any regards for the consequences, not learning anything from the total failure of the robbery opening the movie. That's a pretty good pitch in my opinion. The only problem is the rest of the characters are totally predictable — not to say a bunch of clichés, from the Russian war criminal to the strong yet somehow charming policewoman who would turn into the perfect match for the main character. Yet, that would not be so much of a problem, for an average robbery movie, with even some Ritchie/Tarantino-like moments. The soundtrack is nice though. Yet, that's not what makes this film a failure. They tried to inject the mysteries of black Africa, animist traditions and the fight of noble animals against the vile serpent, including voodoo, sorcery and transmutation. What does that have anything to do at all with a robbery-based movie?? Where "Blueberry" succeeded, "Black" fails and barely makes it, with obvious twists, actions scenes turning flat due to the poor editing, overseen situations, and a strange turn into a wild world where characters just seem to forget their goals and accept their fate without any questions regarding logics or the reason why they got here in the first place. It's a kind of Kismet, and the viewer would finally accept the fact that this movie got straight into the wall, just like the characters with their expectations. Usually, hiring black rappers for main muscle characters (MC Jean Gab'1 is a french rapper) does not give the best results… Sadly this movie makes no exception

Black (2009) IMDb Fantasia Directed by Pierre Laffargue Written by Pierre Laffargue, Lucio Mad and Gábor Rassov

An African tribal shaman is ranting on a street corner in Paris about a prophecy concerning the rise of the evil Snake and the need for the champions Lion and Panther to come together to beat Snake. While crossing the street, the shaman's eyes lock on the eyes of a garbageman with a lion birth-mark on his right cheek. The shaman declares that this man is Lion while the garbageman humours him to get him out of the way of the garbage truck.

The man with the lion birthmark is Black (played by French rapper MC Jean Gab'1 - probably best known to North American audiences for playing Nico in District 13.) Black is disguised as a garbageman, on his way with a crew to rob an armored car. After this heist goes disastrously wrong, Black is hiding out at home when his cousin from Dakar calls to tell him of a briefcase stored in the safety deposit of the local bank filled with diamonds. Black puts together another crew and heads for Dakar to steal the diamonds...

"Did you think you could just come to Dakar and steal the diamonds from the stupid Africans?" Black is asked at one point. Black's journey is nowhere near that simple.

Director Pierre Laffargue effortlessly quotes other films and genres while keeping Black its own movie. The film literally goes from Dassin's Rififi to Mamet's Heist to Kramer's The Defiant Ones to Peckinpah's The Getaway in dizzying succession, but all these are just masks for what is at its' heart an African story.

Black's journey from Paris to urban Dakar and from there deeper into the heart of Africa is punctuated by an amazing soundtrack. From the opening credits, where we follow Black's garbage truck through the highways of Paris while a slow smoky jazz cover of Also Sprach Zarathustra plays, the soundtrack ably serves the film - slowly transforming from cool Parisian jazz to more African beats, mirroring Black's transformation from cool Parisian bad guy to tribal African hero.

If MC Jean Gab'1 keeps getting scripts and direction like this, he could become a great film action hero. He has both the charisma and the the acting chops. At least in this film, he also has a flexible definition of action hero, using guns (small and large), grenades, knives and fists to win his fights, taking the weapons that are available to him and using them all with skill. Most importantly, he has the swagger. He truly believes that if he isn't the strongest man in the room or the fastest, he is definitely the smartest.

If the film has a weakness, it is that MC Jean Gab'1 is so good that he completely outclasses his adversaries. The only actor to keep up with him and match him is Carole Karemera as Pamela. François Levantal does his best in a part that could have gone dangerously awry and wrestles Lagrande just this side of too over the top, but Anton Yakovlev's Ouliakov is a cartoonish bad guy who wandered in from a Jean-Claude Van Damme film when a more nuanced Peckinpah bad guy was needed.

Ultimately, the film is not about the obstacles that Black meets on his journey, it is about the journey itself and I strongly encourage you to hunt out Black to take that journey as well.