Year: 1974
Runtime: 90min
Director: Gordon Parks Jr.
Starring: Jim Brown, Jim Kelly, Fred Williamson, Jay Robinson, Sheila Frazier, Richard Angarola
Nothing beat the first time you watched your favorite heroes team up to battle a great evil. Sure, you’d watched them solo time after time, but this threat was finally too great for any one of them, and to, shall we say, avenge the innocent, it was time for a massive cinematic team up.
Of course, I am walking about Three the Hard Way. What did you think? Some movie with capes perhaps? Long before we had the supposed superhero team up of the century in Marvel’s Avengers, we had a team up of epic proportions in Gordon Parks Jr.’s blaxploitation action powerhouse Three the Hard Way. Here we got a movie that combined the popular talents of blaxploitation veterans Jim Brown (Slaughter), Fred Williamson (Black Caesar), and Jim Kelly (Enter the Dragon) and it did so with a budget and style that would rival most of its peers.
While Coffy and Dolemite were content with their street level shenanigans, their heroes battling racists and drug dealers, this movie goes big. Like James Bond big. We have a madman intent on killing every black man and woman in Detroit, Washington, and Los Angeles with a liquid toxin in the water supply. We have an army of goons with Nazi-like arm-bands and military equipment. And we have a non-stop action ride filled with car chases, explosions, shootouts, and martial arts shenanigans.
I’ll break the plot down for you so you can follow along.
The baddies kill Jim Brown’s buddy, which is bad, but then they kidnap his girlfriend, which is worse, and he needs help from some old friends to crush this conspiracy of evil.
There, caught up now?
No one really gets much characterization. Jim Brown is ostensibly the leader, Fred Williamson is supposed to be the maverick, and Jim Kelly is the martial artist. Their personalities are one-note and their motivations are simply to stop the villains, no more, no less. And those villains have even less motivations for their terrible plan than the aforementioned James Bond scum. They just want to kill black people. Really.
But you didn’t come here for Macbeth Part II, you came here to watch Fred “The Hammer” Williamson dive through a window and chuck bundles of dynamite at nameless goons. You came here to watch Jim Kelly send those same goons to la-la land with a swift kick to the noggin. You came here to watch Jim Brown throw more of those goons out of a moving dump truck which will then explode. And if you came here for all that, you won’t leave disappointed.
Parks Jr. delivers a superbly competent action flick. Maybe this isn’t the classic that his father’s Shaft became, but he has his foot to the accelerator the whole ride. One of the little touches I especially loved was the brief freeze-frame effect used whenever something significant was happening. It’s not overused and adds just an extra touch of style.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about the decision to show all of Jim Kelly’s fight scenes in ultra-slow-motion.
Jim Kelly was one of the coolest martial artists of 1970s cinema, definitely one of the most overlooked, and to see his moves broken down into awkward slow-mo ballets, accompanied by awful grunts and groans. Its a travesty and the only downside to the otherwise acceptable action sequences.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the stylized John Wood gunfights of a decade later. This is still the awkward transition from the action-western of the 1960s to the urban action of the 1970s, and it mostly involves shotguns, random machine gun fire, and lots of dudes falling over in excessively dramatic fashion. Most of the time this is in frame, sometimes it’s not. Interestingly enough, the Director of Photography on this piece was Lucien Ballard, an accomplished western lensman who had worked on The Wild Bunch and True Grit among so many other gems. This was hardly the best of his later year work, but there are moments that remind us of his skill.
I do wish the movie was a little more over-the-top. I mean, this is a bold, exciting take on the blaxploitation genre, giving it a scope and a budget not often seen by lesser features, yet it plays things a little too safe to be really campy. The closest we get to moments of sheer lunatic brilliance come with the brief sequence of the Countess, the Princess, and the Empress, three lady interrogators that Fred hires to do a number on a captured bad guy. They immediately strip down and though we don’t see the actual events unfold, we hear enough to leave poor Jim Kelly shaken.
This and the final sequence, the raid on the Monroe Feather’s (did I mention the lead bad guy’s name was Monroe Feather? No? Allow me to correct my oversight) compound, are the only moments that really struck me as appropriately goofy for a movie that shouldn’t take itself too seriously.
That final fight throws everything in except the kitchen sink. Jim Brown’s got a magic submachine gun that fires explosive bullets (whenever it would look cool), Fred’s chucking grenades left and right, and Jim Kelly refuses to pick up a gun until the end, demolishing his enemies with feet and fists while Feather howls in impotent rage.
It’s a good showing, really.
I wish Gordon Parks Jr. hadn’t met a very untimely end in a plane crash a few years after this film because I would have liked to see what he could have done if given a proper budget and due consideration. He only directed four films in his lifetime, Superfly (the film he’s most well-known for), Thomasine and Bushrod, Three the Hard Way, and Aaron Loves Angela. He was forty-four, but far from finished I think.
This isn’t a piece of avent garde cinema. It’s just a popcorn flick before those were a summer staple. It’s James Bond via John Shaft. It’s fun, damn it.
There are certainly flaws, including the uninspired soundtrack that goes in for R&B over funk, featuring a couple songs by The Impressions. It’s fine, nothing wrong with it, but it lacks the punch from, say, an Isaac Hayes composition or the work of Roy Ayers.
I also lament that we don’t get much of a proper showdown between the heroes and villains, unlike in most action movies of the era. In fact, I had to watch the climax a second time just to spot the moment when one of our lead baddies met his maker.
And sure, I guess I could find plenty of other things to nit pick, but in the end, this is still a solid piece of the blaxploitation movement, one helmed by an actual black filmmaker as opposed to the number of quick flicks churned out by white directors so studios could cash in on the popularity of the genre. Understand that it is a product of its era and don’t go in expecting modern sizzle and flash and you might be surprised just how much fun you have.
And hey, if you like Brown, Williamson, or Kelly, then this is mandatory viewing. As the first of the three movies they teamed up in, it packs a good wallop.
