Movie Reviews : Machismo Is the Big Joke in ‘Sucka’

In Keenen Ivory Wayans’ “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (citywide), there’s sometimes a light line between sendup and near-celebration.

The movie is a satire of the early ‘70s blaxploitation action movies: all the “Shafts,” “Black Caesars” and “Superflys” with their natty, super-masculine heroes, flamboyant pimps and murderous drug czars. Its most obvious model is 1980’s “Airplane!” But, where the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker “Airplane!” team probably didn’t much like the disaster movies they spoofed, Wayans is satirizing something he’s closer to: urban street culture and the black super-heroes of his movie-going youth. On one level, he is having a giggle at the inflated, phony imagery. On another, maybe he misses it.

Wayans, an engaging comic with a sweet smile, casts himself here as returning Army veteran Jack Spade. Machismo is a joke in “Sucka”; Spade is a mama’s boy whose 10-year Army hitch won him medals for surfing and good conduct. Returning home to his mama (the formidable Ja’net Dubois), his dead brother’s willing widow (Dawnn Lewis), and to a neighborhood despoiled by the vile depredations of vice-lord Mr. Big (John Vernon, once again coming up like thunder), Jack searches somewhere, anywhere, for a hero to model himself after.

He finds, successively, supercop Slade (Bernie Casey of “Hit Man”), superpimp Flyguy (Antonio Fargas of “Cleopatra Jones”), rough-neck soul food titans Slammer and Hammer (Jim Brown of “Slaughter” and Isaac Hayes of “Truck Turner”) and karate king Kung Fu Joe (Steve James of “American Ninja”), all of whom do straight-faced “Airplane!”-style sendups of their old or current image--and all of whom, in the end, prove less ferocious than Jack’s mama.

Wayans’ directing isn’t up to his writing, and his writing isn’t always up to his acting. And he misses one aspect of the black actioners almost completely: their pace and zonked-out, overheated style. He is also guilty of an occasional gross, tasteless scene, like the “take it all off” encounter with lascivious bar-girl Cherry, a woman of many parts.

There are misfires in “Sucka,” (MPAA rated R for language) but there’s also some funny stuff. Wayans shows a refreshing taste for self-mockery, something his old “Raw” colleague, Eddie Murphy, might study. In one scene, as a gorgeous cabaret singer gives a shockingly bad rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In” in pseudo-Sarah Vaughan style, the waiter explains to stunned patrons that she gets away with it because she is the director’s sister. As it turns out, she (Kim Wayans) really is.