D: Larry Cohen. P: Fred Williamson.
W: Aubrey Rattan. Ph: Carlos Gonzales. M: Vladimir Horunzhy. St: Fred
Williamson (John Bookman), Jim Brown (Jake Trevor), Pam Grier (Laurie
Thompson), Paul Winfield (Reverend Dorsey), Isabel Sanford (Gracie Bookman)
“I started the Rebels; I can
terminate them”
In an alternate universe, there is
a version of Original Gangstas that
makes good on its promise. A tranche of ageing blaxploitation big-hitters –
let’s call them the ‘blaxpendables’ – unite to teach the boyz in da hood some
respect. A generation clash with a soundtrack to match: hot soul versus brash hip-hop.
Add B-movie stalwarts Robert Forster and Wings Hauser to the mix. How could it
fail?
Yet fail it did, and not only at
the box office. The tone is discordant: social commentary jostles with
put-downs and trash talk. The hand-me-down script levers in too many characters
with too little dramatic function, leaving several of the actors feeding on
scraps. As star/producer, Williamson hogs the screen (it was evidently a
personal project, set in his home town of Gary, Indiana) to the detriment of Brown
and Grier. Shaft and Superfly, Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal respectively,
are restricted to glorified walk-ons, while the talents of Forster and Hauser
are similarly squandered. Sold as an ensemble piece, it is more like a one-man
show.
John Bookman is a veiled version of
Williamson himself, an NFL star who returns to his roots after an attempt to
kill his storekeeper father by the Rebels gang. These are the descendants of a crew
founded by Bookman and friends back in the day, when their intentions were not
exactly benign but not especially nefarious either. Appalled that his
neighbourhood now resembles a war zone, infested with drugs and thugs, John
joins forces with fellow original Rebels to put the upstarts in their place.
As well as co-opting conventions
from the New Jack City/Menace II Society breed of urban black
action film, Gangstas leans heavily
on neighbourhood clean-up clichés: there is nothing here that will surprise
viewers familiar with Gordon’s War,
for example, with Bookman a surrogate for Paul Winfield’s vengeful soldier; Defiance, which also pitted
grizzled tough guys against young punks; or Death
Vengeance and Death Wish III, with
citizens banding together to defend their homes and businesses. There are the
usual recriminatory exchanges between the police and the public – the former
complaining about a lack of cooperation, the latter about police complacency. There
are self-defence classes, fractious community meetings and weasel-worded
politicians. There are plentiful fights, often involving Williamson and Brown
against younger, faster opponents who move obligingly slowly and clumsily – or perhaps
they were simply poor stunt performers – to flatter the stars. Throughout Original Gangstas, it requires a combination
of nostalgia and suspension of disbelief – an effort of will, in other words –
to make the film function as adequately as it does.
There are positives here, to be
sure. It has a punchy tempo, and the charisma of the old guard compensates for
the posturing and gesticulating of the younger actors, some of whom were nonprofessionals.
As expected, it is Grier, playing the estranged wife of Brown’s pugilist, who injects
the most humanity into her characterisation. In one of few significant scenes
allotted to the co-stars, she and Brown mutually grieve for their fractured
relationship and for the death of their son, killed in a drive-by at the start
of the film. It briefly elevates the movie.
This is a recurring issue: fleeting
glimpses of a shadow film, with a more varied emotional register and greater moral
ambiguity. The opening scene laments the deprivation that has reduced Rust Belt
cities like Gary to economic wastelands and breeding grounds for criminality. John’s
tirade against the mayor (Charles Napier) for inaction against the gang scourge
is batted back to him – as the originator of the Rebels, he is reminded, John’s
ethical responsibility is just as great: “That is your legacy for Gary.” This
provokes no more than a furrowed brow. Then there is the fate of a street kid
with a talent for hustling, who is murdered by the Rebels for helping the
heroes intercept a shipment of weapons. The senseless waste of a young life –
too young and too smart to have bought into the gangsta code of honour – is
glossed over with scarcely a pause for reflection. Equally misjudged is the
scene in which Grier gets the chance to avenge her son and the moment is
sullied by a throwaway one-liner.
Even the ghetto gunplay is perfunctory. It is surprising in retrospect that Cohen, the architect of Williamson’s Black Caesar films, didn’t go for a grittier tone; that may have pulled in a younger, hipper crows – for whom the likes of Menace II Society had set a new benchmark for authenticity – as well as those homesick for the black action experts of the past. The best of those married a social conscience with crowd-pleasing thrills, a balance that Original Gangstas never quite manages to achieve. Kevin Grant
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