Film Review: Superfly

It’s honestly been a while since I’ve seen Gordon Parks Jr’s seminal 1972 blaxploitation film, Super Fly, so I can’t speak to specific details that this remake either kept or changed. All I can really recall is that the same basic skeleton of the original’s story is fully intact. But I can say is that this film is surprisingly kind of awesome. This new Superfly is written by Alex Tse, whose only major contributions that I found are Spike Lee’s Sucker Free City and Watchmen, oddly enough, and directed by Director X, who has largely done music videos for various pop and rap artists.

Like I said, it keeps the same basic framework of the original story, but if you hasn’t seen it, the film revolves around Priest (Trevor Jackson), an Atlanta based drug dealer who decides to make one last score so he can get out of the game and live a peaceful life. However, fate has other things in mind, as it presents him several hurdles involving a Mexican cartel, a rival gang, as well as corrupt law enforcement.

As an update, it’s very straightforward. Instead of Harlem, we have Atlanta, instead of Curtis Mayfield’s soul sound, we have a trap heavy soundtrack compiled by Future, who also served as a producer. The idea of jumping into a character that Ron O’Neal made famous with his two performances (the second being 1973’s Super Fly T.N.T.) must’ve been a daunting task, but Trevor Jackson easily captures that cool, confident swagger. He walks into every situation knowing he’s the smartest guy in the room, but doesn’t need to showboat it, and Jackson pulls that mode off remarkably well.

Speaking of being the smartest guy in the room, a theme spelled out fairly early on gives you the sort of vibe that the story is going for. Priest just experienced some trouble outside of a club that got a bystander shot, and he comes to the realization that no matter how smart you may be or how prepared you think you are, it can all go down for the most petty of reasons and it will all be for nothing. And that’s how the story goes. Priest makes a decision thinking he has it all thought through, but a combination of bad luck, coincidence, and petty/moronic behavior from the people surrounding him ultimately makes things so much more difficult for him.

That idea goes hand-in-hand with the idea of the struggles of being a successful black man in white America. Although the only white characters we see (for a significant amount of time) are the two corrupt law enforcement officers, one of whom just recently shot an unarmed black man, the film still is able to capture this atmosphere of Priest having to work with what he has been dealt with, and what white America will seemingly allow him. I’d say this thematic element is more subtle, but the payoffs for it are rather overt, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with that. It’s the kind of film that will end a car chase with the bad guy crashing into a statue of a Confederate general, exploding, and have that immediately followed by an image of the statue falling over and hitting the ground. It’s pretty amazing.

A small, but interesting change that this film made is the inclusion of a polyamorous relationship between Priest, Georgia (Lex Scott Davis), and Cynthia (Andrea Londo). In the original film, Cynthia was a mistress that didn’t mean much to Priest, but here, she is very much a part of the three-way relationship, and she has far more personality and agency than her character did in the original. I love how this is never really addressed, it is simply allowed to be, and it portrays them as all loving, thoughtful, and it doesn’t do any of the harmful clichés that tend to come up when relationships like these are shown in mainstream media. It’s a chance that added a lot to the characters, and made them even more engaging and worth rooting for.

Performances are strong across the board, and it’s not just because you got heavy hitters like Michael K. Williams and Jason Mitchell (the movie’s MVP as far as I’m concerned), but the script allows them to bring as much personality as they can. The film is willing to take its time going through situations we’ve seen before, but done in a way to make it at least somewhat more distinctive. For example, we’ve seen a million times the scene where a cop pulls over a black person, and proceeds to harass them. In this film, when a cop pulls over Fat Freddy ( Jacob Ming-Trent), the officer (Brian F. Durkin) begins mockingly singing Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” out loud as he searches Freddy’s car. It’s small touches like that which really gives the film its own identity, which is an area a lot of remakes tend to stumble with.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Superfly. What seemed like a generic, standard issue urban gangster movie is instead something that is much smarter, more biting, more interesting, and more nuanced than anything I expected. The characters are very engaging, it has a lot on its mind, the costumes are delightful, Priest’s hair is out of this world, and it’s full of small moments and character beats that would’ve likely not been included had the filmmakers not cared about the material. I doubt it will have the impact of the original film, but this is really good stuff, and dare I say, maybe better than the original. It might end a little too neatly for my taste, but it’s one hell of a crowd pleaser. Don’t let this one slip by, this is the real deal.