John Henry [2020]

This movie is a real unicorn of bad movies. A lot of the time with bad movies we can find something to like about it outside of the unintentionally funny parts, but rarely do we ever walk away from a bad movie talking about how the cinematography and direction were actually really nice. That's the case here however. With such interesting use of color and angle I assumed the director had a history in making music videos but at least according to IMDb, nope. He just has a good eye. Unfortunately, he also wrote the script and he does not have a way with plots or dialogue in the way that he does with camera work.

The movie is called John Henry but it has almost nothing to do with the folk legend. In fact, it has about as much to do with the folk legend as the Shaq movie we watched a few weeks ago, Steel. Henry is a strong black guy with a big hammer. That's it. The whole theme about technology versus man? Absent completely. In fact, this movie feels most like a Tarantino film and that really seems to be the inspiration. The plot revolves around a gang that dresses in white. A Honduran woman is rescued from the gang by her half brother who is American and who she got kidnapped from when she came to the US to meet him. This woman, Berta, ends up at John's house and hangs out with him and his dad. John already has beef with this gang because the film starts with one of the gang members running over his dog, but it is then way too slowly reveled that John used to be in the gang himself and that the current leader is his cousin played by Ludacris. Ludacris has a metal jaw because John accidentally shot him when trying to leave the gang many years ago. The gang member bust into John's house, kill his dad, and rekidnap Berta, and the film ends with a final standoff between the cousins. The music implies that John died, because the folk John Henry died, but it's left ambiguous.

This film's plot is so thin that it could have been a half hour. However, in between the lack of plot we get those aforementioned nice shots and some of the funniest music stings we've seen in a while. Most of the film's music was far too on the nose and that final standoff was scored exactly like a spaghetti Western, really pulling that Tarantino comparison. Probably the best scene in the movie was also rather Tarantino-esque: two guys on a stakeout just start having the most random conversation ever about the movie Human Centipede and black recidivism. A My Dinner With Andre style film about them would have been way better than this. Honestly, you should watch this one at least once.

Spoon Rating: 5