Yep, we’re stepping into the 0% club again, and to be brutally honest, this might be even more deserving of that classification than Last Days Of American Crime. I don’t think it’s quite as bad, or as aggressively fucking stupid, as that feature, but it certainly fits the idea that pretty much no-one sees the worth of this thing, myself included. To quote Lelouch: What is the point of this thing?!
Apparently, it’s to be a half-baked modernisation of the folk story of John Henry… or, at least, that’s what the soundtrack and title keep trying to reinforce. However, rather than being a modern tale of human ability vs. the ubiquity of machinery, this is about as standard as it gets for an action-thriller, with the titular John (Terry Crews) being a former thug who, through a series of convoluted events, comes face-to-face with his cousin Hell (Ludacris). And yes, that is his credited character name. With how our introduction to John involves the death of his pet dog, maybe this is trying to be a black John Wick... but considering how tastelessly gory that death is, it's doing a shit job of it if that's the case.
John’s dad is played by Ken Foree, whose entire schtick seems to be using extremely roundabout analogies to explain incredibly basic shit. Like him arguing with sex trafficking escapee Berta (Jamila Velazquez) about bats to explain how white the world is. Or telling her brother Emilio (Joseph Julian Soria) about how his dick doesn’t work anymore to show him how unfair the world is. He is basically the avatar of the film’s methodology: Despite its relatively short run time, it sure isn’t in a hurry to say or do much of anything. There’s bits of street crime commentary between the margins, but what that has to do with two dudes arguing about The Human Centipede is beyond me.
It doesn’t help that, in-step with the barely-existent pacing, the action is also threadbare. There’s quite a bit of gore to go around, but it’s also edited really conspicuously so that it isn’t too gory. We get more implication and after-the-fact blood-spray from John crushing heads with his hammer than actually seeing it happen; it’s like Venom all over again. The only moment that really stands out is when John bangs his hammer into a wall, and manages to send a splinter right into some poor sap’s jugular, in an easy contender for Luckiest Kill Of 2020.
It can’t commit to its own ideas, it can’t even commit to its rating, but we’re still not at the worst part of this whole thing. That comes with the use of hip-hop aesthetic to try and add some meat to the picked-clean skeleton of a plot here. A lot of it comes in the form of a soundtrack partially provided by West Coast legend DJ Quik, the only actually cool thing to be found here. There’s even an attempt to ape Kendrick Lamar’s good kid m.A.A.d city, with John’s grandma quoting Bible verses over old home video footage of John and his former company of gangstas. But even then, when it gets to the inclusion of Hunter Lamar’s Yuh, a song explicitly about how hip-hop is commoditized by people who don’t care about the struggle, it’s hard not to laugh at the sheer hypocrisy on display.
To say nothing of the rest of the soundtrack by director/co-writer Will Forbes, which is desperately trying to sell how epic this all is and failing miserably. It’s this random mish-mash of electronics that seemed to have escaped a horror film, tacky Spanish guitars, and Western-themed showdown music that feel about as thrown together as the script, which is already phenomenally bad (they pulled a ‘man confused while shopping for tampons’ bit in this thing).
I never thought I’d say this, but the Superfly remake just got outclassed in sheer try-hard gangsta posturing. Right down to the colour-coded bad guys. On top of how crappy its cred as a ‘thriller’ is, how undeserving it is of its own soundtrack for multiple reasons, and how much John Henry feels like a side character in his own sodding movie, it’s also one of the most boring things I’ve sat through all year. There isn’t a single reason to care about what happens, as the filmmakers can’t even maintain an audience’s attention for 10 minutes, let alone the full 90-minute duration. I found this on Netflix, so thankfully I didn’t have to pay extra in order to see it, but I still feel a very strong urge to ask for a refund of my time, if not my money.
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