“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.”
– Author Stephen King
There’s a cyclical nature to things in entertainment. For instance, the things that are popular to you as a child tend to come back around as an adult, sometimes marketed as “vintage” to the next generation and sometimes just remade for you to enjoy again. Notice the modernization of old tv programs (ex: Matlock; Hawaii 5-0) or the reboot/remake/legacy sequels of older films (The Running Man; Anaconda), it’s just the things that one generation loved coming back around to see how it fits with a new audience. With its 1980s setting, music style, costuming, stereotypes, and more, it’d be fair to assume that this is all New Jack Fury, the first feature-length production from writer/director Lanfia Wal (Hypertext Girls), had going for it — but that’s just the surface of this biting satire of 1980s-made Black-centered action comedies that holds little back as it taps into the zeitgeist of then to showcase just how little has changed since.
In the city of New Jack, Detective Dylan Gamble (Andre Hall) and his partner Wash (Adrien McLean) work hard to clear the streets for the safety of the citizenry, but their ultimate target is Silk Styles (Page Kennedy), the leader of the Silk Syndicate. Unfortunately, Silk has his fingers everywhere, ultimately leading to Gamble’s dismissal from the force — a most tragic event as Gamble’s girlfriend Tanisha (Ally Renee) is kidnapped by Silk’s people, requiring Gamble to look for help from someone he’d arrested, Hendrix Moon (Paul Wheeler). Adding the unstable Leslie Kindall (Dean “Michael Trapson” Morrow) to their rescue team, Gamble’s gonna risk it all to get his girl back and maybe bring down Silk in the process.
L-R: Andre Hall as Dylan Gamble, Dean “Michael Trapson” Morrow as Leslie Kindall, and Paul Wheeler as Hendrix Moon in NEW JACK FURY. Photo Credit: Jon Rigattieri. Photo courtesy of Lost Sleep Entertainment/SXSW.
New Jack Fury is as much an exercise in cinematic minimalism as it is maximalism. The film’s shot using green screen to create the world of New Jack, making it clear that when the actors aren’t on sets, they’re just moving through space decorated to look real. Simultaneously, this world is chock full of details so that every inch, even in its ridiculousness, contains something that makes the world feel authentic to the rules Wal sets within the film. This correlates to performances that are heightened to match the digital aesthetic of New Jack Fury, creating characters that are caricatures more than people, not just including Leslie’s lethal Michael Jackson impersonator. These big personalities need a world just as large to exist within which is what makes locations like clubs Sweaty Nipple or 8-Bit Tit both fit within the realm of Wal’s creation while also leaning into the type of comedy and details that drive New Jack Fury. In order to achieve this, sometimes it means that the characters are functioning within the “real” world and others a more digital space, but Wal seamlessly threads these together so that the rules of his tale are never broken or weakened in the transition. But this is merely the dressing for Wal’s intention, the way to get you buy tickets to the show and be open to what he’s really doing: laying forth a gauntlet regarding Black culture in America.
From the start of the film, Wal establishes that New Jack Fury isn’t just a movie we’re watching, it’s a relic of by-gone era in several ways. The most obvious is the stylistic choice of the sweaty, neon-soaked 1980s aesthetic that makes up the New Jack City, the city various shades of blues, purples, greens, and reds. Then it’s the scratches on the frame, the visible tracking marks, and the cue marks in the corner indicative of wear-and-tear on celluloid improperly stored somewhere. But more than these, it’s that the film not only opens with a title card proclaiming this a “Movie of the Week,” a long-gone tradition of over-the-air broadcasters featuring a film each week, but the movie itself gets broken into by commercial breaks, an act that conveys what we’re watching isn’t just Wal’s New Jack Fury, but a previously lost VHS that recorded said movie of the week. With this framework, we realize that the film is intended not just as a throwback nestled within 2025 nostalgia, but a discovered time capsule from the 1980s when this film “aired.” This is where the commentary becomes known as each commercial leans into one terrible 1980s stereotype about the Black community after another. It’s here that the story of New Jack Fury transitions from a Keenen Ivory Wayans-like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988) action comedy into a satire akin to Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987). Once New Jack Fury reveals itself as a meta-commentary on the ways the artistic Black community was sought after either to play the worst parts of society or to mimic the few singular Black artists who could break through predominantly white America, the various caricature characters, the setting, their dialogue, everything comes into sharp focus. To that end, Wal has nestled a thematic equivalent to a Bamboozled (2000) within a Kung Fury-like (2015) blaxploitation/minstrel show wrapper. Is the obvious appearance of a mic kit or the lack of continuity between shots an accident, a specific choice to capture the “movie of the week” vibe, or is it a sharp commentary of what white America expects from a Black creator and their creations?
For his first-time feature debut, Wal does just about everything in the construction of New Jack Fury, making it entirely his vision. He not only wrote and directed the project, he served as production designer and editor, as well as handling the majority of VFX artistry. The director is always the visionary at the front of a project, but, in this case, it’s more than his vision guiding the production, it’s his actual fingers, too. The rotoscoped character cards during the title sequence (with their Grand Theft Auto: Vice City vibe) that identify characters and their respective performances, he did that. So, when one takes a look at how a simple actor’s performance reveals a mic, an edit to show a different perspective breaks continuity, or the way in which one of the faux-commercials is constructed to harness the full weight of harm racial coding does on an audience, this is all Wal speaking directly to the audience about what he thinks of *their* expectations, a choice that should leave the audience who notices wondering about what it speaks to within themselves.
Look, when it comes down to it, New Jack Fury is a solid time. It knows exactly what kind of film it is, its tongue firmly in its cheek, with characters riffing on musicians like Kool Moe Dee or the aforementioned Michael Jackson or wearing outfits suspiciously like a certain Detroit detective in his first trip to Beverly Hills (while using a copious amount of Soul Glow). The film is certainly reference after reference, but not without thought or intention behind it. More to the point, it’s worth acknowledging how far the Black community has come since the Jim Crow era both within media representation and out, yet is still valued with limitations today. For a real world example, look no further than the firing of Air Force General CQ Brown (four months into a four year position and only one of two people fired, neither being white men) which highlights how, still today, all it takes is one sour-puss White man to derail an entire career. Though Wal doesn’t get into that aspect specifically, with what he does focus on, it’s clear that he’d have an opinion if asked. What’s old is new again, indeed.
Screening during SXSW 2025.
For more information, head either to the official SXSW webpage or New Jack Fury website.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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