iamthemdt
After watching this movie and the bonus features on the DVD, I feel like John Ridley had a very good idea of what he was doing, but everyone else associated with the cartoon did not.I've been seeing some people call the movie and the book racist, but it seems according to the interviews with John that was the point. He openly cites police brutality and innocent black Americans being murdered for no reason in some of the parallels with the story. But this movie poorly dives into that if it does at all, playing the narrative as one of just action. By the end, we don't see a character looking to take out innocent superhumans, but rather a badass action star getting ready for round two.Basic story is there's a team of cops that go around as a superhuman extermination squad. It begins with them taking out a pyrokinetic terrorist. Then Soledad (Lil' Kim's character) just starts taking out superhumans when she sees them. No attack, no confrontation, she just blows what could possibly be described as a literal angel out of the sky. The angel's husband wants revenge, tries to show her the error of her way while at the same time exacting his revenge on the extermination squad, all of it ending with Soledad taking him out, "saving" the day. At the end, she's driving down the road with her boyfriend and get into an accident where the other person is trapped in their burning car. Her boyfriend reveals that he's a superhuman and tries to save the trapped woman. Soledad's first response to this isn't hubris or that she already learned to love someone different, maybe she's been doing the wrong thing all this time - it's to shoot him. Pull out her gun and keep firing even though her bullets aren't doing anything. It ends with her at her desk trying to craft a bullet that could take someone like him down.Now even if this whole idea of Soledad being a monster was poorly expressed, this still could have been a decent movie. Could have been, except it was animated in Flash, and not all that well. Flash is a powerful animating program, and there are movies and DVD programs I've seen that look halfway decent. This one uses all of the cliché tricks and zooms and half-assed animation that you used to see on Newgrounds in the early 2000s. (Once again though - several Newgrounds animators were better than this.) The acting is also pretty horrendous at times, but surprisingly not all from Lil' Kim? Seeing that Lil' Kim starred in this, my expectations were low, as only a handful of rappers have held my attention in acting roles. Granted, Lil' Kim is not great, but so many other people in the movie are so much worse than her. There some pretty comedic deliveries from the supposed villain of the movie, none of it intentional. On top of that, the music is awful. It sounds like MIDI ringtones, and especially with a rapper in the main role... You'd think they'd be up on music and know what the soundtrack really needs. Not saying it should have licensed tracks by Lil' Kim, that would've been a misstep, but at least reach out to a competent producer to get some good music piped into the program. This literally sounds like old phone ringtones. I've made better stuff on MTV Music Generator for PlayStation 1.With the DVD as well, it's very clear that this was just a cash grab by the producers. It's blatantly put out there in not only in the John Ridley interview, but in the DVD itself. The video inexplicably has a Lil' Kim video on it in the bonus features. The video wasn't made for the movie, the song wasn't in the movie, it's just there. So if you're looking for a DVD quality copy of "The Jump Off (Featuring Mr. Cheeks)", hey, here it is. Then in the John Ridley interview, not only does he gush about how Flash animation was the "best" way to tell this story, how Hollywood won't bankroll a movie like this with black actors, he then goes on to describe the meeting he had with the production team, Urban Entertainment, like a mafia meeting. He says two burly muscled types showed up at his house saying they wanted to work with him, and he just agreed to it because he didn't want any trouble. He also said he doesn't know where the money comes from to produce these productions, and he's fine not knowing it. He insinuates that there are illegal activities going on in the movie's production, and the producers PUT THAT IN THE INTERVIEW. I feel like they ASKED him to say that. Then, if you watch the Lil' Kim interview, they don't ask her to talk about the story or the character much, just what cartoons she likes, what other movies she's doing (Which I'm willing to bet the two other titles she mentioned, Lil' Pimp and Guns & Roses, are released by the same people), and how she likes to fire guns.This was pretty much released to trick people into buying it, because they like Lil' Kim and they like black entertainment. John Ridley has bigger ambitions it seems, but these people making the movie did not share that vision. If I were to give a compliment, the movie is at least short. I think here it says it's 90 minutes (Or maybe it was the back of the box), but the main movie clocks in at just under an hour. Don't watch this.
David Topping
This film is a real pity. Ridley's book "Those Who Walk in Darkness" is a very disturbing view of what might happen in a society in which superheroes are so commonplace that they have been legislated against and exiled from America.The story takes the point of view of a female law enforcement officer joining a unit which specialises in hunting down superheroes who are illegally remaining in the US. The book makes no bones about the fact that these units are essentially assassination squads and provides some chilling parallels between this future society's law enforcement and the Nazi Einsatzgruppe. The novel dwells in some detail on the character's attitude to those she hunts and the way society has become intolerant, making her appear relatively normal. The book even draws some sympathy for her for the way she is treated by her superiors.Unfortunately this film is so poorly and amateurishly animated and voiced that absolutely none of the ambiguity of the book (making a hero of someone most people would think of as being morally wrong) and renders this a sort of children's cartoon with an adult rating, thus guaranteeing that no-one will enjoy it. What comes across is an "in your face" portrayal of why it's OK to go round killing people because they're very different, and thus appears very racist / (specist?). The book brings out a very different message and clearly questions whether this is right.I can understand that good animation costs a lot of money and that a topic like this one must be difficult to gets funds for. I think in this case though it would have been best left as a book.I really can't recommend this to anyone. The book however is worth reading.
