Black Belt Jones
Steve's rating: four lava lamps.
Information about this film in the Internet Movie Database.
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Black Belt Jones on the beach.
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A hundred years from now, when cinema historians compare notes on America's late-20th-century fascination with martial arts films, they'll probably cite the era's most famous ass-kickers: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Jet Li, Bruce Li and David Carradine (um, well, maybe not him). Hopefully they will also recall Jim Kelly, the well-chiseled, well-afro'd dude who broke the karate-chopping color barrier.
Kelly is best known as Williams, the inner-city karate champ on the run from racist cops in Enter the Dragon. In that film, Kelly whooped much ass, bedded many chicks, and delivered some classic lines (e.g., "Man, you're right out of a comic book," and "Booool-shit, Mr. Han-Man!") before he was bludgeoned to death by the iron-fisted villain. Producers Fred Weintraub and Joseph Heller recognized Jim's badass screen presence and immediately fashioned a starring vehicle for him that fuses the chop-socky and Blaxploitation genres, both of which were happenin' in the 70's. This was only Kelly's third film, but it was his first and only leading-man role in a major studio movie.
Black Belt Jones is an amalgam of Shaft (a studly black hero-for-hire), Cleopatra Jones (a kung-fu fighting female heroine), The Chinese Connection (karate students avenging the murder of their master) and The Godfather (spaghetti slurping Italians who talk with their hands and say, "Mama mia!"). Jones (known as "B.B." or just "Belt" to his cigar-smoking boss) is some sort of freelance secret agent working for an unnamed government intelligence agency. In an opening sequence designed to show off his fighting skills, baby-blue jumpsuit and perfectly piqued hairstyle, B.B. thwarts a group of assassins (who look more like migrant farm workers, armed with junky guns and dull knives) attempting to ambush a Central American ambassador in the parking lot of a low-rent TV station. With a full orchestra playing a proto-disco tune on the soundtrack, B.B. dispenses with the thugs (leaping over cars, smashing their heads through windows and shooting one man in the ass), then wordlessly hops in his zippy Renault and speeds away. Too cool.
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"You broke my nail!"
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But, Belt's got principals. Specifically, he's opposed to getting killed. The head cheeze of the intelligence agency wants Belt to sneak into a big winery (actually a front for the Mob) and abscond with some very incriminating photographs; the government's already sent in three agents and each one ended up fermenting with the grapes in an oak vat. The boss offers Jones $100,000, but Belt don't play that dangerous tune. "Don't believe that bullshit about niggas being invisible," he says. Good point.
As luck (and screenwriting) would have it, Belt inevitably comes up against the mobsters anyway, after their black henchman Pinky (Malik Carter) and his gang begin harassing Belt's martial-arts mentor, Pop Byrd (Scatman Crothers, in a great toupee!). It seems the city of Los Angeles is constructing a new civic center -- in Watts! -- and the Mob wants in on the land-grab; Pop's dojo is located in the heart of some upwardly mobile ghetto real estate. A brawl ensues and Scatman teaches Pinky and his goons a two-fisted lesson, but when the baddies come back for revenge they accidentally kill the old man. When Sidney (Gloria Hendry), Pop's estranged daughter (and an ass-kickin' mama in her own right) blows into town seeking to avenge her dad's murder, and single-handedly beats the crap out of his gang, Pinky summons the aid of some "A-1 Bogards" (translation: "treacherous niggas") with names like Tango, Plummer and Jelly, who promptly kick the living shit out of everyone at the karate school and then kidnap Black Belt Jones' young protegee Quincy (Eric Laneuville, of "The White Shadow" fame), demanding a huge ransom or the deed to the karate school.
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The creators of "The Man Show"
must have seen this.
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At last it's time for the titular hero to T.C.B.; realizing that Pinky is in cahoots with the Mob, Belt decides to kill two birds with one roundhouse kick. He hires a group of 15-year-old female trampoline artists to help him invade the Mob's winery (don't ask, it must be seen to be appreciated), where he steals a boatload of cash and the long-forgotten incriminating photos (soon forgotten again). Belt pays the ransom with the Mob's cash, then double-crosses Pinky and turns the mob against him; Pinky is about to sleep with the fishes when all the intellectually challenged goons realize they've been outsmarted by Black Belt. So, they head for his Malibu beach house and the requisite car chase begins, concluding at an industrial car wash with a protracted punch-and-kick-fest amid waist-high soap suds, and all the bad guys end up in the belly of a garbage truck.
Black Belt Jones is the greatest action film ever made. How can anyone possibly scoff at Scatman Crothers kicking ass on guys twice his size and half his age? How can anyone resist sexy Gloria Hendry stepping out of her heels and announcing, "I'll make you look like a sick faggot," before dealing out lethal karate moves. Or Ted ("Love Boat") Lange as a black militant and Marla ("The Jeffersons") Gibbs as a barmaid? A mafioso (Vincent Barbi) whose name sounds like "Tunasalad," so he goes by "Big Tuna" for short? Or high school coed gymnasts willing to risk their lives in a top-secret mob hideout raid for $5,000 (remember, Belt himself earlier refused the same job for 100 grand -- the hypocrite!)? Sure, you could drive a truck through the plot holes, but in what other film do the good guys shout "Let's go to McDonald's!" after outsmarting the villains?
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BB tries hard to clean up his neighborhood.
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Guys like Jim Kelly don't get paid to act, they're hired to kick butt, and Jim did it well (although, in several scenes where Belt wears a ski mask, a stunt double performed balletic kicks and twirls). That's why it's difficult to understand how he utterly faded from the Hollywood scene. Guys like Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal aren't thespians either, yet they routinely work in films and teleseries; Jim really hasn't done a lot since Black Belt Jones -- he appared with Jim Brown and Fred Williamson in films like Three the Hard Way (1974), Take a Hard Ride (1975, as a deaf mute Indian) and One Down, Two to Go (1983, a total suck-fest), and he made a couple of stinkers with Al Adamson including Black Samurai and Kill Factor (his most recent known film appearance is a cameo in Something Weird Video's Afros, Macks & Zodiacs). Nevertheless, Kelly has endured as a badass cult icon through the decades, and Black Belt Jones is the pinnacle of his flash-in-the-pan film career.
 
Review date: 10/4/99
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