Undercover Brother 2 has Michael Jai White as our hero, as Eddie Griffin doesn't reprise his role from the first one. In the early 2000s, he and his brother Lionel are frozen in an avalanche in Austria while trying to take down The Man, played by Barry Bostwick. They wake up in modern times, but White is still in a coma, so Lionel has to come back to America and defeat The Man's latest plan. As Lionel tries to reorient himself with the modern world, he and The Man discover that The Man's son plans to take over the world by poisoning everyone with a drug called Woke, which makes people into ultra Liberals first, then turns them into hypersensitive over-argumentative social justice warriors that try to kill each other over disagreements. Can Lionel crack this case and save the world?
This movie was fantastic. Yes, after we find out White's character is in a coma and Lionel, played by Vince Swann, will be taking over, there are definite bait-and-switch fears. But then he's sent to a new hipster coffee shop in his old, now gentrified neighborhood, and it's just all good from there. Swann and the rest of the cast turn in a great performance, the action's fun, the jokes work, and the commentary does a great job of critiquing modern discourse from the Left, while maintaining a healthy does of denouncing the bigotry and hate we've seen from the Right. I think this is the kind of movie and message we need right now in 2020.
And after I got through that early skepticism and fear that we'd have a Michael Jai White bait-and-switch, when the movie became something much more, I realized that I should have trusted White's judgement that he wouldn't have signed onto a project like this if it wasn't good. And his character does find his way into the film more, which helped. I saw him on an interview he did for VladTV, and in it he said he didn't want to be known as only an action guy, because you can get locked into that--and action guys have a reputation for not being able to act too. At first the thought as an action fan is "why do we need you act when your martial arts skills are so fantastic? Just give us a well-choreographed fight every 15 minutes, and we're good." But later in the interview he talked about some of the things he's been through in Hollywood, like filmmakers saying to him "what we need is a white you," and then it makes more sense that he needs to show how versatile he is, because he won't always get those action films we want to see him in. One thing I like about a movie like this, or the exceptional Black Dynamite, is we get to see him do both: be a comedic actor that is also an expert martial artist.
Barry Bostwick is fantastic as the baddie. When we last saw him on the DTVC, he was FDR in FDR: American Badass!. What's great about his baddie is Bostwick is clued into current events, and he uses that to shape his baddie the same way the rest of the cast uses it to shape their characters. I looked at his imdb bio, and he's been working a lot lately. It feels like more and more actors are going the Eric Roberts route, trying to get in 5 or 6 credits a year, which is great, but often there's a lot of variability in the quality of all those projects. This is one at least that I can say is good.
One of the problems people run into when they criticize the hypersensitivity and cancel culture that can plague the modern Left, is they end up gaining the sympathy of people who hold extremely pernicious views on the far Right. This movie does a great job of straddling that line by making sure that, as they make fun of a guy with a Man Bun, curly mustache, and cardigan he picked up in the women's section, they also keep reminding us that Neo Nazis marching in VA are the real bad. I think that's one of the issues that has come in the backlash to Cancel Culture, really problematic views have found sympathy, when they really shouldn't have. That's an advantage in a 90 minute movie versus a 3-minute segment on a cable news talk show with 4 panelists divided by boxes via satellite, or worse, a rapid-fire Twitter pile-on, is that a message can be made, and then the message can be added to and shaped so we gain a full understanding of what is trying to be said, and that kind of approach is something we need more of now I think.
Going back to the Man Bun guy, who we discover is in cahoots with our main baddie, it's a phenomenon that I think, like the Fanny Pack, isn't going to be like "oh that's so dated," but rather "that was never in, even when people were doing it." In the 50s we thought 2020 would have us all in one uniform, probably shiny metallic, gender normative (did you like that?), there's no way we could have predicted that a man with a bun, a curly mustache, and woman's cardigan sweater, would ever be something that men who consider themselves "hip" would ever wear. I will say, I think 2020 is a bit late for that, that that was maybe more a mid-2010s thing, but it still happened. I mean, no one saw that coming. Back to the Future II didn't have guys in Biff's gang rocking Man Buns and curly mustaches, and if it did, we'd say "is this Back to the Future, or the Leslie Nielsen parody version?" So when our hero Lionel encounters Man Bun after being frozen for 15 years, he reacts the way that we all should have been reacting all along.
All right, so I enjoyed this movie, I think it really worked for me. Right now it's on Netflix to stream, so it's easy to get your hands on. For me, it's worth checking out.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6843446
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