Super Fly T.N.T. 1973. USA. Directed by Ron O’Neal. Screenplay by Alex Haley, from a story by O’Neal and Sig Shore. With O’Neal, Roscoe Lee Browne, Sheila Frazier, Robert Guillaume, Jacques Sernas, William Berger. DCP. 87 min.
In the underrated follow-up to Super Fly, Ron O’Neal directs and reprises his role as Youngblood Priest, now retired from Harlem’s underworld and living in exile in Rome with his partner, Georgia. Although the sequel trades in Curtis Mayfield’s brilliantly cool music for the energizing Afro-rock of the British-Ghanaian-Caribbean band Osibisa, Super Fly T.N.T. is less a traditionally action-packed blaxploitation film and more a meditative, existentialist work about a man whose identity is riven between his criminal past and a relevant future as a Black citizen and family man, between an artificial lifestyle and a political commitment to Pan-African self-determination and well-being.