A satire about successful African-Americans who've lost sight of their roots and the righteous brothers determined to save them from themselves, DROP SQUAD suffers from major inconsistencies of tone and undisciplined writing.
The DROP Squad is an idealistic group of Afro-centrists with names like Garvey, Huey, and Stokely, determined to shine the light in the faces of African-Americans who have lost their way, forgotten their roots, moved up, and sold out. Bruford Jamison Jr. (Eriq LaSalle) aspires to mainstream
success, his own berth on the luxury liner of bourgeois ambition: he goes to work at an advertising agency in a suit, has a tasteful apartment downtown, wishes his family were a little more polished, and would no more hang on his stoop drinking a 40-ounce bottle of Mumblin' Jack malt liquor (a
product he helps sell) and listening to gangsta rap than he'd do a Stepin Fetchit routine with a slice of watermelon in his mouth. For the unseemly content of his character, Bruford's righteously braided and cowry-shelled sister Lenora (Nicole Powell) denounces him to the Squad. He's soon tied to
a chair with Oreos stuck on his face, assaulted by revolutionary rhetoric and the occasional two-by-four to the gut--because some people just don't want to see the light.
Who merits the wrath of the DROP Squad? A corrupt black politician who accepts bribes from white men. A street-hardened drug dealer who ... yes, sells drugs, even right next to the playground. A restaurant proprietor who names scrambled egg dishes after Rodney King and sells tacky T-shirts of
Thurgood Marshall. A writer whose reactionary books preach an anti-feminist ideal of relationships between black men and women. These offenses hardly seem of equal weight, but the DROP Squad casts a wide net in its quest to re-educate perpetrators of crimes against their race, and they're all over
an assortment of asses before you can say "Jheri Curls."
One of DROP SQUAD's many problems is that it has little in the way of plot; it's essentially a series of skits strung together. But Bruford's reprogramming provides what little structure there is, as the Squad challenges his ideas about success, racial identity, and family loyalty. In a series
of flashbacks, we see what he's done to merit the wrath of the Squad, including his work on an outrageously offensive TV commercial that perpetuates the stereotype of black women as loud, tasteless gluttons in choir robes, drawn to a particular fried chicken combo because of the religious verses
printed on the napkins. He's also taken to task for not getting a job at the agency for his cousin, an uneducated drunk. We catch occasional glimpses of the fates of some of the Squad's other clients: the dishonest politician suffers public humiliation, while the unrepentant drug dealer is turned
back onto the streets as a lost cause. Soon after, he's shot to death. Bruford is eventually released, and reassesses his life while the Squad moves on to other jobs.
Inside the shapeless, erratic mess of DROP SQUAD (DROP is an acronym for Deprogramming and Restoration of Pride), there's a miniature gem dying to get out. The movie is based on an independent short called THE SESSION and probably should have stayed on that scale. At 15 minutes, DROP SQUAD might
have been an astute dissection of the conflict between pride in your roots and assimilationist attitudes. At feature length, muddled politics reign supreme. Is the Squad a group of righteous brothers trying to spread the message of self-love and dignity, or a pack of intolerant thugs who can't get
real jobs and get their thrills bullying anyone who doesn't see things their way? Is the Jamison family drama a real crisis of the younger generation seduced by false ideals, or are we talking crabs in a bucket?
Writer-director David Johnson doesn't seem to know, so an audience can hardly be expected to figure it out. The film is further hampered by a poorly constructed script, ugly cinematography, and the distractingly erratic tone. At times DROP SQUAD seems meant to be funny; at others, it relies on
dreary, low-budget action/adventure conventions; and at still others, it lapses into earnest, revolutionary cinema preaching the likes of which haven't been seen since the early '70s. In short, the film's a mess. This Spike Lee-produced misfire (he makes a brief cameo appearance as well) purports
to be satire, but successful satire demands a razor sharp edge; DROP SQUAD isn't especially clear about what it's mocking, and the result is unfunny and frequently unpleasant. (Violence, profanity.) leave a comment
