May 10, 1996

I don’t remember ORIGINAL GANGSTAS playing in a theater near me, but it apparently opened on 474 screens, enough to make it into the top 10 (at #9, below JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, which had been out a whole month already). I was excited for it because it was basically a Blaxploitation family reunion. It stars Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Ron O’Neal, it was back when you actually had to have them all on set together to make that work, and director Larry Cohen (BLACK CAESAR, HELL UP IN HARLEM) did manage to get a shot of them all in a row firing guns in front of an exploding car. In the dark, though. But I think it’s them.

Unfortunately the script by Aubrey K. Rattan (HIT LIST) doesn’t do anything beyond trudging through the most basic tropes you expect, and Cohen doesn’t manage to find much energy, momentum or style in it (much less humor). Unsurprisingly, but crucially, the score by Vladimir Horunzhy (ELVES) could not hold a candle to the worst and most generic of ‘70s studio musician jams, and the modern songs we hear bits of don’t do much even though they got Ice-T, Geto Boys and MC Ren to contribute. This movie has the most famous faces of the genre, but not a single drop of the juice.

It’s set in Gary, Indiana (like THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR), depicted as a couple of mom and pop businesses on a strip surrounded by an expanse of boarded up buildings and sidewalks grown over with weeds. O’Neal narrates the opening montage explaining that they have “the highest murder rate in America, maybe the world,” chronicling the economic downfall of the area after the closing of a steel mill, the location of the headquarters’ for rival gangs the Diablos and the Rebels. Then members of the Rebels do a drive-by on a young athlete named Kenny (Timothy Lewis) for beating their guy in a half court basketball game. Store owner Marvin Bookman (the singer and writer Oscar Brown Jr.) witnesses it and violates the no snitching code by giving Detective Slatten (Robert Forster, SCANNERS: THE SHOWDOWN) a license plate number. Then he warns Kenny’s friend “Now son, don’t go trying to get your own justice, it just ain’t right.”

Of course, “trying to get your own justice” is what his own son and founder of the Rebels, the ex-football star John Bookman (Fred Williamson right after FROM DUSK TILL DAWN) will return to town to do after the Rebels shoot at Marvin for narcing them out. John shows up in a small plane smoking a cigar with soul music playing on the soundtrack, so that’s pretty cool. There are shots of him looking cool carrying a bag around, looks like a bag of loot, but of course it’s his luggage.

For what it’s worth, the Rebels co-leader Spyro (Christopher B. Duncan, “Soldier #1,” IN THE ARMY NOW) seems genuinely hurt when he hears about Marvin’s betrayal. “That’s my favorite fuckin store! Why’d he do that, man?” He seems to share equitable leadership with Damien (Eddie Bo Smith, Jr., a musician who’s in several Andrew Davis movies). Their main enforcer is a hothead named Kayo, played by the rapper Dru Down. The weird thing about Dru Down is that he’s the son of Bootsy Collins (though he didn’t grow up knowing that) and he looks alot like him. So in this movie he’s like an evil Bootsy going around yelling and pointing guns at people.

John tries to get help from one of the old crew, Bubba (O’Neal), but he resents John for leaving town and literally tells him “Fuck you, motherfucker” to end their conversation. So at first it’s just John who sometimes shows up to slowly punch the new jack Rebels as they cause trouble at the mini-mart or the barbershop. When he’s losing a fight suddenly his old friend Jake Trevor (Brown) shows up from Cleveland wearing a British Knights windbreaker to help. He reveals that he was Kenny’s father, though he never met him because the mother, Laurie (Grier) didn’t want him around. (She later says she didn’t want to get in the way of his boxing career.)

Another former Rebel, Slick (Roundtree), happens to be in the same bar as them playing pool. He stayed in town, owns a hardware store. He says when they were Rebels they protected people, now it’s about drive-bys. But he also says “It ain’t about breakin fingers no more” so I guess they did used to break fingers, which doesn’t sound that heroic.

John wants to make a truce with the Rebels. Jake wants revenge. Laurie wants them in jail. So it’s, like, different philosophies. Reverend Dorsey (Paul Winfield, WHITE DOG) arranges peace talks between the parties. Some people think he’s a sellout, but he’s not a total nerd – he has a dangly cross earring.

Eventually all options are exhausted and the o.g.s agree they need to fight back, so they go to a scooter-riding kid named Dink (teenage Wu-Tang affiliate Shyheim), who arranges an arms deal in the parking lot of a firework stand. He guiltily admits to John that he was the one who snitched on his dad and got him killed, but he still charges them 15 grand. He takes a 10% commission, plans for it to be his last big score, says he’s moving to Seattle, but Damien snaps his neck before he leaves town.

Wings Hauser is in this too by the way. Not a big part. Fred Williamson produced it, so there’s a part where a young woman says “He ain’t so bad lookin for an old man.” Unfortunately this was Cohen’s last time directing, though he did continue writing. In fact PHONE BOOTH (2002) was one of his biggest films.

I didn’t like ORIGINAL GANGSTAS whenever I first got to it on video, but I was excited to revisit it as a period piece. Unfortunately it’s as boring as I remembered. The so-called Blaxploitation genre obviously had an appeal at the time because it countered previous cinematic depictions of Black characters. The movies have always been controversial for promoting other stereotypes, but people were excited to see these larger-than-life Black men and women who stood up proudly, took no shit, had swagger and flair, called attention to themselves, and yet were untouchable by the racist cops or anybody else.

Whatever aspect of empowerment those movies do or do not retain, they still stand out because those types of characters are fun to watch, especially as they become less common, which was part of the reason ORIGINAL GANGSTAS seemed like a great hook. It was two decades later and shit seemed less exciting, it was time to bring back the o.g.s to show everybody how it was done.

Maybe if it had had the energy or style of the classics it would’ve worked, but absent that the whole endeavor seems ill-judged. In the movies Williamson, Brown, Grier, Roundtree and O’Neal made in order to earn their places in this cast, they were against the system. Maybe they were beloved in the neighborhood, maybe they were even there to clean up the neighborhood, but they were a thorn in the sides of the cops and mayors and racists. In this ‘90s context, though, they come off as conservative. They are the system. Marvin sagely notes the societal conditions that made the new Rebels the way they are, but it still feels like the grownups telling the kids to pull their pants up and behave. John disagrees with the mayor (Charles Napier around the same time as RIOT) but grew up with him and can go meet with him. Also he wears a tucked in polo shirt with the alligator on it!

Yeah, these new Rebels are bad news, maybe worse than the o.g.s were in their day. But worse than the characters those actors played, or the criminals they were friends with? Not by much. I’m getting to be an old guy but I can’t get fired up by these old guys coming to lecture the youth for not overcoming the conditions their own generation helped create.

This update also doesn’t move beyond the sexism of the old movies, and is in fact a regression if compared to the ones that starred women, because Grier is primarily here to be the emotional female presence. She’s there to weepily express the common sense criticisms of the men’s violence, not to be Foxy Brown or Coffy (though, to be fair, she does teach a self defense course and gets to clumsily hit Kayo with a garbage can lid and then shoot him). Thank God she had JACKIE BROWN right on the horizon.

So really the biggest gimmick it has going for it is to do Blaxploitation in the hip hop era, which had already been done better (but not that good) five years earlier in THE RETURN OF SUPERFLY, which didn’t have O’Neal but did have a soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield. Hell, I’d also say I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA did it better in 1988, even while being a comedy. And that also had Jim Brown in it (plus Bernie Casey, Antonio Fargas and Isaac Hayes). Anyway, the ’70s/’90s gap is illustrated by having the Chi-Lites perform in the bar where the old guys go, while the youths go to a huge dance party where there are cameos by Bushwick Bill and Scarface of the Geto Boys and Numskull and Yukmouth of the Luniz. But they don’t perform or do anything at all.

It would be nice if this to had more to say. But it needed to be more fun. It was legit exploitation in the sense that it just went through the motions and had the right names on the poster to possibly make some money (on video and cable). But I think everybody involved was capable of something better. Honestly, watching this again makes me more forgiving of THE EXPENDABLES. At least that had a little personality. You win some, you lose some I guess.