After working together on Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, director Robert Clouse reteamed with Jim Kelly, who stars as Black Belt Jones, the man the cops go to when they are outmatched. It’s a classic blaxploitation movie filled with martial-arts action and comedy.
Buy Black Belt Jones Blu-rayWhen Jones is first introduced to the audience, he is on assignment at a TV studio where a Latin American ambassador is set to be attacked by a hit squad after his interview. The men are armed with weapons but Jones makes quick work of them through the opening credits.
A man gets caught wearing a wire by the mob and is killed. He’s the third the police have lost. They call in Jones and offer him $100,000, but he passes on the assignment. However, he ends up taking on the mob anyway.
There’s a new civic center going up in Los Angeles and Don Steffano (Andre Philippe) wants in on it. Holding up the deal is a karate school owned by Poppa Byrd (Scatman Crothers, shortly before his voice work on Hong Kong Phooey). Steffano’s man Big Tuna (Vincent Barbi) sends Pinky (Malik Carter, in a very funny performance) to get Poppa to sell the property. Pinky’s crew gets roughed up and kicked out by the karate students. They find Pop at a card game, but come on too strong and accidentally kill him.
Sydney (Gloria Hendry), Pop’s daughter and actual owner of the property, comes to Los Angeles for Pop’s funeral. She goes to Pinky’s place and single-handedly beats the hell out of his crew. It’s then a back and forth of one-upping each other. Pinky kidnaps a karate student for ransom, wanting money or the property signed over. Jones and his female crew steal the money from the mob to pay off Pinky. During a moment of down time, Jones and Sydney get involved in a rather strange bit of foreplay that finds her hurling insults and punches at him.
After their implied consummation by Sydney walking into frame wearing only a man’s shirt, the bad guys show up at Jones’s beach house. He and Sydney lead them on a car chase that ends up at a sanitation truck compound complete with a car wash, which is where the climatic fight sequence happens.
Black Belt Jones is fun. It’s filled with entertaining fights that are executed more like the Three Stooges than Bruce Lee. Not sure if intentional, but during a fight scene on a train car, Jones sounds like Curly “whoop-whoop”-ing as he dishes out punishment. There’s plenty of laughs, both intentional and unintentional. Malik Carter is the main source of the humor as he delivers his lines with great comic timing and intention, such as when he refers to our hero as “Black Butt.” It’s also fun to see actors in small roles that would go on to be better known for their TV work: The Love Boat‘s Ted Lange as a militant and The Jeffersons‘s Marla Gibbs as a bartender.
The video has been given a 1080p/MPEG-4 AVC encoded transfer displayed in its original aspect ratio: 1.85:1. Sourced from a recent 4K scan of the original camera negative,the image looks clean while retaining film grain. Colors are solid, blacks are inky, and whites look accurate. Texture detail can be seen throughout with occasional moments of soft focus inherent to the source, like when Jones and Sydney are walking on the beach and he suggests they get together,.
The audio is available in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. Dialogue is clear, but most of Big Tuna’s lines are dubbed and sound hollow as a result. The punches and kicks are accentuated with over-the-top effects as are bodies landing on the ground but they sound consistent through the movie, as does the gunfire. Composer Luchi De Jesus’s score typically plays under the scenes. Dennis Coffey’s “Theme from Black Belt Jones” plays at a louder level during opening and closing credits.
The only Special Feature is the original theatrical trailer.
Black Belt Jones is a very good introduction to those unfamiliar with the blaxploitation genre. The Warner Archive Blu-ray benefits from the new 4K scan with a satisfying picture and satisfactory audio considering the source.
