Back in the 1980s or 1990s following the popularity of Richard Pryror and Eddie Murphy making jokes about white people with safety from hate groups, many other black comics began to draw comparisons between how black people and white people do things. But by the early 1990s with the emergence of Def Comedy Jam, it almost became a parody that it was mocked on The Simpsons and In Living Color.
The Blackening is about an hour and a half of a bunch of characters saying, “Black people do things like…” over and over. It doesn’t help that the movie is a good 20 years after the first two Scary Movie flicks that Keenan Ivory Wayans directed along with his brothers, Marlon and Shawn, who co-wrote. And considering that Undercover Brother, back in 2002, also made the connection between how Friends is a white-person TV show that black people didn’t watch. They watched Living Single instead.
This movie is like a collection of memes and tired old jokes jumbled together in a movie that has a terrible payoff when we find out what’s happening. A group of friends gather at a country cabin to celebrate Juneteenth. What they don’t know is a couple, Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharoah), has previously had an altercation with a malevolent presence that questioned them on a board game about black culture.
Immediately when they arrived they run into harassment by a park ranger White (Diedrich Bader). They are also surprised to see an old friend, Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), has been invited. He’s different from the rest in that he seems like a combination of Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Steve Urkel from Family Matters.
Lisa (Antoinette Peterson) is the most central character and she’s there with her unfaithful college ex, Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls). King (Melvin Gregg) is his best friends. Allison (Grace Byers) is only she’s half-black and that is constantly mentioned. Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins) is the gay one and there’s a lot of mentions of him being gay. Yet despite all of them, the jokes fall flat. I watched this twice to make sure I didn’t miss anything. This received good reviews so I bean to wonder what I had missed.
And I know some people will say, you’re just white so it’s not for you. No, I can understand black jokes. I just don’t think they were presented the right way. There’s not much of a plot here. It’s just people referencing Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the Black National Anthem. I miss when comedies were actually funny and weren’t just characters mentioning pop culture references. The group find the board game that Morgan and Shawn played at the beginning. And they find that Morgan has been tied in via a closed circuit recpetion in another location.
The location is being stalked by a person in a mask. And if you’ve seen any slasher or Saw movie, you know where this is headed, but it’s not scary. And I think the title may be because the director, Tim Story, felt the need to film everything so damn dark that everything is mostly black and hard to see. When the twist is revealed, I felt like it was too much. There’s a lot of mugging and chewing scenery. And then it just ends.
I didn’t understand if this movie was trying to say things about racial tropes in movies or upholding them. The whole sequence with the introduction of Ranger White is handled poorly and delivered with bad acting. In 2000, Spike Lee made the movie Bamboozled, which is a satire on black culture in media. It may haven’t been made too well and is too long at areas but it said more about race than this movie ever could. This movie seems to remind me of Bamboozled in that a culture will embrace the stereotype as long as they find it entertaining. I look at Reservation Dogs and the Madea/Tyler Perry movies as a prime example of this.
I was totally bored and watching this twice to see what everyone raved about only makes me not like it more. Don’t waste your time. I spent over three hours watching it and I’m not going to spend anymore telling you not to watch it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 