‘Shadowboxer’ delivers suspense (just forget those cardboard black folks)
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
Perhaps the best thing that can be said of a suspense film is that, at the end, when you feel the film driving to its climax, you don’t know how it’s going to end – which, given the nature of the genre, pretty much means you don’t know who will kill whom or how.
Certainly the worst thing a review of a film of this nature can do is to spoil the ending by suggesting who lives until the climax and who is alive at the very end.
This much must be said for Shadowboxer, the 2005 film by Lee Daniels and starring Cuba Gooding Jr., which opens in St. Louis on Friday at Plaza Frontenac Cinema: As it drives to its bloody climax, it’s anybody’s guess who will get to pull the final trigger.
This much is certain about reviewing it: There is not much else that can be said about the plot without spoiling the suspense.
The script by William Lipz unfolds somewhat deliberately, and Daniels makes the most of this. We are given the story in small pieces, which contributes greatly to the suspense and the pleasure one takes from the film. For this reason, anything like a plot summary or a description of the characters in relation to one another is unfair for the person who plans to watch this movie. And, if you like suspenseful thrillers, it’s worth seeing. It will ransack your guts and make your pulse beat faster. At one or more points, you will want to scream “Kill him!” or “Kill her!” of “Don’t!”
That said, Lipz’s script is badly flawed in its characterizations, particularly in regards to race. Gooding’s lead character has some depth, as thriller heroes go, but the other black characters are pitifully flimsy and unconvincing stereotypes. We have a black crackhead medical assistant. Isn’t that cool? We have a black school official (at a tony suburban school, mind you) who calls to the children – within hearing of some parents! – “Get your asses in here!” And don’t get me started about the STOOPID hip-hop strip scene Gooding has to go through.
The most egregious embarrassment of black folks in the film is the one that gets the most screen time, after Gooding’s lead man: a sister girl from the ‘hood played by the pop singer Macy Gray. At first, I thought she was parodying the role, but the more I saw of her character Neisha, I had to confess she was indeed sincerely trying to act a role that was itself so badly botched it only seemed to be a parody.
James Baldwin once said that “the Negro in America is a form of insanity that overtakes white people,” and these sorts of one-dimensional freaks and bores are a form of insanity that overtakes screenwriters. It makes going to the movies something of a hazard for anyone who knows a wide variety of complicated and productive black folks.
The director Daniels, by the way, is black. I’ve no clue about Lipz’s ethnic background. But racist stereotypes and inadequate characterizations can be recycled by anybody, whether or not they belong to the ethnic group being pathetically misrepresented. Being black, alas, does not guarantee that you will be able to imagine complicated black fictional characters. Daniels should be cheered for his chops as a suspense director, but encouraged to vet his future scripts much better.
Gooding, the star, is good in this flick. I’ll admit that I have avoided his films after he first burst onto the scene with a particular brand of manic energy that drives me nuts, but in Shadowboxer he plays a quiet role with subtlety and calm. He also came to the shoot pretty buff, and the camera spends quite a bit of time on his bare chest and rump. That didn’t do it for me, but admirers of the male form may have one more reason to overlook the cornball characterizations and give Shadowboxer a chance.
