Priest is an under-the-radar dealer working in virtual anonymity (he has no arrest record) and with a very small crew-mainly his right-hand man and longtime friend, Eddie (Jason Mitchell), and his enforcer, Freddy (Jacob Ming-Trent). The mainspring of the action is a shooting.
#Superfly 2018 movie#
The movie opens with Priest paying a visit to another dealer, his debtor, named Litty (Allen Maldonado), and being greeted at the door by an assault weapon. “Superfly” reflects the gun-madness of modern American society, with drug dealers and police alike bearing arsenals-worth of military-style firearms and using them with a chillingly casual frequency. It’s a death-steeped drama, but no major character falls victim to gun violence. In the original “Super Fly,” a few handguns made an appearance but, if memory serves, not one of them is discharged in the entire film the gun is the ultimate threat, one that is even unsheathed only sparingly. There’s another crucial difference between the two films, a difference that marks virtually every encounter, every scene, every moment: firepower. If Priest’s stratagems in the original seem like the moves of a chess master, his new ones resemble the work of a grandmaster of simultaneous blindfold-chess, for whom, through information technology, distant nodes of power are instantaneously connected (the last image of the film is even a king-a white king-being tipped over on a chess board). The remake runs twenty minutes longer than the original-twenty minutes that detail Priest’s audacious maneuverings and their grim effects in milieux left unexplored by the earlier film. Unlike the earlier film, the new one (written by Alex Tse) goes beyond the local streetside and backroom focus of the drug trade to expose a viper’s nest of conspiracies that extend from the internecine conflicts between groups of dealers to the collaboration of major elected officials. In the movie, that underworld comes to the surface of society mainly in the form of media representations (such as television-news accounts)-which are themselves part of the story, and part of the sleek glow with which Director X endows his film. The remake, by Director X, is set in Atlanta, and the night life and its artificial light (as well as an emphasis on indoor locations rather than street life), suggests that Priest and the other drug dealers in his realm occupy a hermetic underworld. The earlier film takes place mainly in daylight, on the streets of New York, which its director, Gordon Parks, Jr., approaches with a vitally textured, documentary-like range and avidity. But the experience of watching these movies is very different-as different as night and day.
Both allude to the endemic racism that’s rooted deep in American power, and both movies link racism to official corruption. (He’s played in the earlier film by Ron O’Neal in the remake, by Trevor Jackson.) Both depict a criminal with peaceful dreams, who took to crime in lieu of the kind of legal business from which circumstances excluded him. Both movies tell the story of Youngblood Priest, a coke dealer looking to make one last big score and then get out. “Superfly” (one word) the remake and the original “Super Fly” (two words, from 1972) are in many respects similar.