Candyman Review: A 2021 Reboot Made For The Wrong Audience

Our DaCosta’s the candy man, the repetitive and superficial fourth entry in the horror franchise, is set in Chicago, the same city where Bernard Rose’s original 1992 version of the candy man began the saga by exploring the connection between mythology, urban legends, and violence against blacks. Those themes haven’t diminished since Rose’s movie hit theaters, they’ve only intensified. But the remake confuses them, with flat social commentary and even more flattering horror emotions.

DaCosta’s version opens in 1977, with a haunting, repeated rendition of Sammy Davis Jr.’s signature song, “The Candy Man,” jingles. The camera peers over the Cabrini-Green Townhomes, the infamous housing projects located auspiciously on the opulent north side of the city. Police patrol for a local murderer, a black man with a hook in his arm. He has been accused of putting razor blades in candy and giving it to children, injuring a young white woman in the process.

Residents, including a young black man heading to a basement laundry, avoid the cops patrolling him. The racial dynamics at stake and the overly policed ​​location make the situation ripe for trouble. As in Rose’s film, DaCosta uses Cabrini-Green racial dynamics to set a story about racial violence inflicted by whites, the ways whites invade black spaces, and the damage that an overzealous police force and a listless government can cause blacks to be neglected. .

Several rounds of Black Lives Matter protests and the proliferation of videos capturing black death at the hands of the police have crystallized Rose’s film as a fantastical folk horror, a palpable parable of black reality, set on an abandoned side of town. . DaCosta is the recipient of these themes, responsible for translating them into a story that is adapted to the current racial environment. But she the candy man it is a confusing and overloaded web of superficially presented ideas, including criticisms of gentrification and the white critical lens, and a request for black liberation.

After the opening of the flashback, DaCosta’s the candy man jumps to the present day, where Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a prominent visual artist, engages in a chemistry-free relationship with art gallery director Brianna (Teyonah Parris). Lately, Anthony has been mired in a creative rut. His earlier series of paintings, featuring black men with ropes hanging from their necks and bare chests, is now old news. But then Brianna’s brother (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) tells Anthony the legend of Candyman, in a campfire story that sums up the events of the 1992 film: Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) ventured into Cabrini-Green and kidnapped to a black baby, but he died. in a bonfire. Anthony, who connects with black pain on a superficial level, exploiting it for personal fame, decides to make Cabrini-Green his next track.

This won’t be the only time we hear about the legend of Candyman – how you only need to say his name five times in a mirror to call him out, or how his story goes back to the late 1800s, when a mob of lynchmen captured him for being a father. . a boy with a white woman. They cut off his arm, covered it with honey, and unleashed a swarm of bees to kill him. While viewers who haven’t seen the 1992 film will likely need this override on its plot, DaCosta’s sequel recounts the events of the previous film no fewer than three times, making its 90-minute runtime spread out. terribly.

Each iteration of the count uses the same visual style, with mesmerizing silhouette images of real life painter Kara Walker, which makes miniature black cutouts of people to convey the legend. At first, this motif offers a captivating narrative method, linking the origin of myths with the idea of ​​shadows on the wall of a cave. But DaCosta hits that well too many times, and in each successive implementation, the strategy is less intriguing, mainly because there is little meaning behind the aesthetic choice. While Walker’s art often questions the past, interrupting America’s romanization of the racial fairy tale and the idea of a great melting pot, the redundant count blunts the intended depth of your work.

That’s a general problem with the script, written by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and DaCosta: the candy man it’s so message-driven that it flattens into a generic fable. During his investigation, McCoy ventures to Cabrini-Green, through the rows of almost abandoned houses. Meet William Burke (Colman Domingo), not just one of the area’s last residents, but a totem of the pain and sense of abandonment felt by the city’s terrified blacks.

Domingo does some Herculean heavy lifting like William. He speaks for this community, and in a sense, for almost every African-American urban neighborhood, when he tells McCoy that he saw a black man wrongly accused of being a Candyman and beaten to death by the police. Domingo nearly succeeds, instilling a hidden agony and rage within William that is not fully developed in this withered script.

DaCosta’s previous movie, Little woods, was vivid and detailed because he used the rugged landscape as an extension of his characters. On the candy man, Cabrini-Green is not so well used. Viewers who have never been to Chicago may not be aware of the geographic importance of Cabrini-Green: The housing project bordered the Gold Coast, one of the city’s upscale neighborhoods. Barring a brief shot of Chicago’s glittering downtown skyline surrounding the row houses, DaCosta’s movie doesn’t work to convey that economic disparity and why the city desperately wants to gentrify past projects to make room for more housing. deluxe.

Today, those row houses are the last vestiges of Cabrini-Green: the brick towers shown in Rose’s film were demolished in 2011. Those abandoned houses still harbor a hunch, of the memories of police brutality that punctuate the landscape. and generations of black people who once lived in the complex. But DaCosta’s film does not convey any of that, because she barely filmed in the neighborhood.

The lack of a visual metaphor makes the film’s exploration of gentrification more of an assemblage of nonspecific dialogues. Talk about what gentrification is and not what it looks like. The same can be said for the film’s deaths, which are less plot-driven and more message-driven. There is a lot of blood spitting and breaking bones, but without the sense of terror that lurks in the shadows, or the foreboding behind the walls.

The film also delves into body horror, while exploring the obsessive sacrifice that artists make for their art. After Anthony is stung by a bee, a rash develops on his hand, causing his skin to itch and slowly peel. His burst of neurotic creativity coincides with the deterioration of his body. The hands-on makeup work here is highly effective and gruesome, as is Abdul-Mateen II’s cowering performance. During this period, McCoy produced a plethora of pieces focusing on the Black Death. Much of it is from memory, because it is exploiting the historical pain shared by blacks in a superficial way. A white art critic who is unimpressed with his work sees a different replay, one about black artists perpetually crying over gentrification. She is totemic of an ignorant target-centered critical lens, but DaCosta’s critique of that lens is not very interesting or connected to the general narrative.

Like Anthony, DaCosta struggles to create art that is not fully informed by the past. From Anthony listening to Helen’s audiotapes to other visual motifs, such as a hole in the wall behind a mirror, this film is filled with abundant references to the past. the candy man tickets. But what story does DaCosta want to tell? If this is a movie about the Candyman legend, why is it just an underused bogeyman? If it’s the residents of Cabrini-Green, why not highlight them or the area more intensely? Vanessa Estelle Williams reprises her role from the 1992 movie, and considering the sheer depth of her backstory, in the first movie her baby was kidnapped by Candyman, it’s a wonder why this story didn’t focus on her.

Like Anthony, DaCosta seems to want to say something substantial with his work. She the candy man it makes broad metaphorical traces of the broader black urban experience, but it is directed at an outside audience that needs a didactic narrative to understand racial politics. The ending of the film is particularly confusing, doing more to set up a sequel than to cleverly put together. the candy manVaried and nascent themes. The film is losing a cohesive vision, to the point where audiences will spend the entire film waiting for the flashbacks and recaps to end, and for the DaCosta film to finally begin. But in the end, it has only offered a visually stunning tribute to the original film. For a director with her talents, that is not enough.

Peele’s own directing work tends to explore tense social issues on a more subtle level than this, but the other projects he has endorsed: Twilight Zone, Lovecraft country, and Hunters – have been disappointing because they approach their issues with suffocating frankness. DaCosta’s the candy manA sequel clearly shot by a director with only a cursory knowledge of Chicago, a lesser understanding of the ways in which legends haunt us, and an inequality in relating scares to social commentary, it is bold in its ambition. DaCosta tries to pay homage to a classic horror movie while upping the ante on that movie’s social conversations, but follows in the same disappointing footsteps of the other Peele-produced projects. She does not have the voice to address these issues in depth.

the candy man debuts in theaters on August 27.