“Y’all seen Magic Mike, right?” Michael Jai White asks an audience of screaming women during the opening scene of CHOCOLATE CITY (2015). “Now we’re gonna add a little chocolate.”
Consider that bit of dialog Chocolate City’s thesis statement. You’ll be reminded several more times throughout the course of the movie that this is supposed to be the Black Magic Mike. Writer-director Jean-Claude LaMarre even went so far as to name his movie’s protagonist Michael. It’s good to have goals.
The story is pretty boiler plate. College student Michael McCoy (Robert Ri’chard) is trying to focus on academics, but he can’t ignore his family’s financial struggles. His mother Katherine’s hours have been cut at her job, and Michael’s part-time job flipping burgers at a local diner doesn’t even net him $150 a pay period. Not helping matters is Michael’s older brother, Chris (comedian DeRay Davis, quickly wearing out his welcome), who lives at home but doesn’t work. “You’re thirty and still living under my roof,” snaps Katherine (Vivica A. Fox, a long way down from Kill Bill but leagues above Cool Cat Saves the Kids). “Get a J-O-B! What’chu waitin’ on?”
“’Til I’m forty?” replies Chris, his first and only line of genuinely funny dialog.
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| “Hey, weren’t you in Cool Cat Finds a Gun?” |
A solution to the family’s financial woes comes in the muscular form of Princeton (White, phoning it in yet still too good for the movie), who sizes Michael up — in the men’s room of a strip club, no less — and hands him a business card, suggesting Michael contact him if he “ever thinks about making some paper.” Were this a different kind of movie I’d think Princeton was coming on to Michael, and that would be a movie I’d very much like to see. But this is a movie from the creator of the Pastor Jones films, so we just get a few lame gay panic jokes instead.
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| Michael Jai White literally phoning it in. |
And so a star is born. In no time Michael is taking home gym bags full of cash, paying off the family’s debts and buying himself a new Merc. Pretty impressive when you consider that the Chocolate City dancers seldom take off their pants, the ladies in the audience lucky if the dancers bare their asses. And you can just forget about seeing any dick in this movie.
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| This is as close as you get to seeing a cock in Chocolate City. |
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| Robert Ri’chard tries to make the White Man’s Overbite sexy. |
On top of all these pressures in his personal life, Michael has to deal with the resentment of Chocolate City’s one-time headliner, the aptly named Rude Boy (Tyson Beckford). While Rude Boy is an unpleasant character, I have to say I was in his corner. Michael’s young and cute, sure, but he isn’t all that. Adding an uneasy subtext to his stardom is that Michael is lighter than all the other dancers. In lieu of exploring this uncomfortable nuance, the movie chooses to have Rude Boy enlist a few guys to beat the shit out of Michael and steal his gym bag of money.
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| At least Rude Boy knows why we watch male stripper movies. |
It takes more than a beating to keep Sexy Chocolate off the stage, however. But then Carmen joins her friends DeeDee (Eurika Pratts, who should be informed she’s not as endearing as Rosie Perez when she talks like that) and some other chick for a night out at Chocolate City, on the exact same night Sexy Chocolate performs with his face covered by a gladiator helmet to insure a more dramatic/contrived unmasking. Rest assured, neither Michael inadvertently revealing his secret identity to his girlfriend nor his unsatisfying confrontation with Rude Boy is going to stand in the way of Chocolate City’s happily-ever-after.
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| A puzzled Carmen watches her boyfriend Michael fellate a soft-serve cone. |
Chocolate City is nowhere near being a Black Magic Mike, coming off more like Magic Mike XXL if it were directed by Tyler Perry, only not quite that awesome. LaMarre employs Perry’s same approach to storytelling, mixing lurid subject matter, religion (LaMarre shoehorns his Pastor Jones character into the story), broad comedy, melodrama, racial stereotypes, and regressive sexual politics, and then throws a wet blanket over the whole thing. The movie is too tame to be titillating, too by-the-numbers to be engaging, too competent to be so-bad-it’s-good, and yet it somehow made enough money to justify a sequel.
Less Nudity, More Assholes
I don’t want to make generalizations, but I think the quality of a movie is automatically suspect when the writer and director is listed by their Instagram handle, as LaMarre is in the opening credits of CHOCOLATE CITY 2: VEGAS (a.k.a. Chocolate City: Vegas Strip, as it appears on Netflix; or Chocolate City: Vegas, as it’s listed on IMDb). Most of the principles reprise their roles in this 2017 sequel, which finds the Chocolate City nightclub struggling to keep its doors open (no reason is given, but I’d hazard a guess that it has something to do with their strippers not really stripping). Princeton’s financial troubles are compounded by his ailing father’s mounting medical bills. Foreclosure is imminent. In the face of all this adversity, Princeton does what any man would do: turn the whole mess over to Scary Spice.
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| Mel B. let’s the boys know they’re fucked. |
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| Ernest Thomas is allowed one more moment of dignity... |
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| ...before doing whatever this is, because comedy. |
After a run-in with some racist rivals (“Obama really got y’all believing anything is possible, huh?”), the Chocolate City guys discover that one of their former dancers, Pharaoh (Ginuwine), has become a celebrity exotic dancer in Vegas, even though his physique, undoubtedly the best in his bowling league, is not exactly jacked. Interestingly, Pharaoh’s troupe, the Hippz—which, because a poor font choice in the group’s advertising, I thought were the Nippz—includes the very same racist white guys who taunted the Chocolate City team earlier. Our protagonists aren’t all that concerned about Pharaoh gyrating with the Alt-Right, but they are seriously pissed that he stole their moves, which I can’t say looked all that unique. Now they have to re-choreograph their entire act.
But first they avail themselves of all a green screen Vegas has to offer. The next morning, hungover and still half asleep, they seek out the help of—I’m not making this up—Best Valentine (Mekhi Phifer), the “player who shows other players how it’s done” (i.e., he’s an arrogant asshole), who in turn and puts them in touch with former dancer Carlton Jones (Marc John Jeffries). Carlton isn’t as big of an asshole as Valentine, at least, and hearing Jefferies’ delivery of the line, “The women associate your sexual prowess with buuuulge and definition,” almost justifies the movie’s existence.
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| And the award for Best Cinematography goes to... |
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| Michael/Sexy Chocolate squanders a night in Green Screen Vegas. |
Rattling around elsewhere in the movie, Pastor Jones’ chubby son wants to pursue a career in exotic dancing; Michael’s ex-girlfriend Carmen, now an insufferable bitch, heads to Las Vegas, accompanied by DeeDee, their gay friend Kevin, and some other chick, to become Sexy Chocolate’s manager now that his brother Chris is out of the picture; and Michael’s French professor goes to great lengths to ensure his failing pupil takes his “state exam” (in this movie’s universe, not even France values the French language as much as much as Michael’s home state, which turns out to be Georgia, the same place that put this crazy bitch on the national stage). With the exception of the pastor’s son’s ill-chosen career aspirations, these subplots have no purpose beyond giving actors from the first movie another paycheck and letting the audience know that, even though it looks like it’s set in Los Angeles, Chocolate City was set in Atlanta all along (but filmed in L.A.).
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| Pharaoh stands amidst his Alt-Right dancers and proudly displays his one-pack. |
Much of Chocolate City 2 is padded with footage of that male exotic dancing competition, which achieves the rare feat of making scenes of hunky men suggestively undulating boring. We already know who will win, anyway, so why stay awake until the end? There’s certainly no reason to start watching Chocolate City 2. Its predecessor, while not an example of masterful filmmaking, at least showed some technical proficiency. Chocolate City 2 is worse in every way, and on top of all that it has even less nudity. Clearly, @JeanClaudeLaMarre needs to stick to his Pastor Jones franchise and stop trying to make inspirational sexploitation a thing.
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| One of only two scenes of gratuitous nudity in Chocolate City 2: Vegas, a movie allegedly about male strippers. |
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| I’m suddenly in the mood for kielbasa. |
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| Pharaoh — but most likely not Ginuwine—flashes the crowd. |
