Black Pander

Rating: 1/10 (10 November 2019)

The early '70's gave us the Blaxploitation genre, and while most of those movies were really bad, they made up for it with attitude; those movies knew how to carry themselves (see William Marshall taking a goofy idea like Blacula and really selling it and even bringing dignity to the character). Those movies, even at their worst, had an indelible swagger. This, this is just a neutered pandering. Disney is trying to compensate for a century of dumb cartoons (Song of the South) targeted at a race with a dumb cartoon targeted at a race. The movie tries too hard without taking any chances - King T'chala is a PC Shaft for 10 year olds who don't know who Shaft is. This movie feels more patronizing than empowering. Empowering is seeing Jim Kelly in Three The Hard Way, Kung-Fu kicking the s**t out of a squad of cops in slo-mo. Here we have Americans and Englishmen doing African accents (I don't even know if they're accurate) in an idealized fantastical version of Africa where they're the most advanced because they happened to get an all-purpose element. The CGI is horrid. The premise is the ages-old half-siblings struggle over a throne. The Blaxploitation movies at least had a black authenticity to them - this is just empty weightless pixels.