Outlaw Johnny Black has White as the eponymous hero. He's searching for a guy named Clayton (Chris Browning) who killed his father, but in the process gets mixed up with the law, and finds himself pretending to be a preacher in the small town of Hope Springs. Beyond his own subterfuge, an evil land baron (Barry Bostwick) is trying to take the old preacher's property through violent and corrupt means, meaning someone with Black's skills are needed. A woman named Jessie Lee (Anika Noni Rose) has been mobilizing the townspeople against Bostwick, and while she and Black don't get along initially, she realizes he's the man to help them. But will his past catch up with him before he has the chance?
This is really good. It's 2 hours and 10 minutes long, which is longer than my usual 90 minutes, but I could tell that White, Byron Minns, and company really wanted to go bigger with this, which is something I could appreciate, and most importantly, I think they pulled it off. This is bigger than just a DTV actioner, and bigger than just White and co. dipping their feet into making Westerns, and I think it worked. Like Black Dynamite, the comedy is there, as is the send up to Westerns, but then also the proper tribute to the Blaxploitation Western, a sub-genre that I wasn't as familiar with myself until I started digging more into Fred Williamson's career--Johnny Black's outfit is a tribute to Williamson's in Joshua. White delivers as the hero the way he does in Black Dynamite as well, giving us a larger than life presence but also excels in his comedic timing; and then the rest of the cast does their thing as well, from Minns as the preacher whose name White steals, Rose as the leading lady, our baddies in Bostwick and Browning, and then like Black Dynamite, a whole host of supporting names like Kym Whitley, Tommy Davidson, Jill Scott, and Randy Couture, among many others. This is the movie I was looking for from White as a next film after Black Dynamite.
This is only Michael Jai White's third film of the year, which isn't great considering the number of stuff he has out there, and that was a big reason why I wanted to get this one as soon as I could. When I had Jon Cross of After Movie Diner on the DTVC Extra podcast to talk about Bloodfist III and IV, we talked about my top 5 DTV actions stars of all time, which are 1. Dolph, 2. Williamson, tied for 3. Wilson and Rothrock, and 5. Gary Daniels. He asked me if Wilson could ever move up that list, and I didn't think so, that if any change could happen in the top 5, it might be as we go on with Williamson that he may pass Dolph. With that in mind, in looking at Michael Jai White, he's someone who could crack the top 5 and maybe go higher, based on stuff like this. I mean no one other than Williamson has ever made anything like this before, let alone Black Dynamite as well, and that has to weigh heavily into a ranking like that. If you go 6-10, I have 6. Lamas, 7. Seagal, 8. Dudikoff, and 9. Van Damme. I used to have Adkins at 10, but I think at the very least White is tied with him now, if not passing him into the 10th spot with a film like this. White is not only a dynamic martial artist, but he's a dynamic overall talent, and he shows us that again in this film.
With a Western featuring black and white characters, the issue of the N word is inevitably going to come into play. If you look at Williamson's Westerns in the 70s, white characters threw the word around constantly, to the point one of his movies even had it in the title. Then you had Tarantino's Hateful Eight, where Samuel L. Jackson's character gets called it a lot. White and Minns in writing the script went a different route here by using a word that's similar but not the same. It's still close enough that I feel awkward using it in this review, but I liked that they did that. There's a debate around using that word in an artistic sense. Who should be able to say it or write it, especially in Tarantino's case as a white person writing dialog for white characters that are saying it. White and Minns don't even mess with it, but they do joke about it, like when a baddie goes to call Johnny Black a "Ni--" and gets kicked in the face, and while he's on the ground says "I was going to say nincompoop!" I think it just gets back to the fact that White and Minns and the rest of the people making this and Black Dynamite are working on a different level.
People have sometimes complained that I'm too hung up on runtimes, which is fair, even though it's pretty consistent among the DTV/low-budget movie blogging/podcasting community that anything over 90 minutes is borrowed time, which means as a filmmaker you need to make more out of that time to make it worth it for us. More often than not, those 100-minute plus films don't manage to make that extra time worth it, and for Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, and co. to go in planning to make something over two hours, it was a gamble, but one that paid off. I'd say around the 45-minute mark the film loses steam a bit, but for the most part it manages to stay entertaining throughout. Part of it is the writing, and Jon Cross made a point about this when he was on the DTVC Extra podcast I mentioned above: humans can only laugh or be scared so much before it comes too much. What White and Minns do to mitigate that is they give us enough that's entertaining without while giving us a break from laughing or feeling tense, which, combined with a story that progresses along pretty well except for that one slower patch I mentioned. The thing is though, it is a gamble, and it requires great material. This movie is the exception that proves our 90-minute rule, but it is the rare film that's worth that extra time.
Finally, Fred Williamson has a cameo at the end along with Jim Brown and Michael Madsen. The issue then is that make this Williamson's 30th film on the site! I considered holding off on this one so we could get a better film for his 30th post, one that has him in it more, but I thought that would be too ridiculous, especially when I had this film watched and was planning to review it in this slot, to make it sit for a month or more while I try to get another Williamson post in? The other thing though is, while he only has this one cameo, he has it because the film is paying tribute to his influence and contributions to the world of cinema, so I think that combined with the fact that I can just make his 31st movie be the one where he gets the full accolades, made the decision to just go ahead with this review an easy one. It's a really great scene, where he and Jim Brown are watching everyone from a balcony at the end, and they recognize the job every did making the movie and upholding the traditions they started in the 70s.
And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can rent this on Amazon Prime or your cable company here in the States. From a money standpoint, you have to decide what your budget is, but I think renting something like this has the added benefit of showing the studios that a movie like this can sell, it doesn't need to be all comic book heroes or Bruce Willis to draw us in.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8667828
And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.
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