Lee's opening sequence, mirroring the Seventies freeze-frame, split-screen openings of countless blaxploitation flicks (several now rescued from obscurity by Austin near-homeboy Quentin Tarantino), has UCB driving in high style through the 'hood in his - what else? - big pimpin' Caddy. Despite an afro roughly the size and shape of Congo, it's clear from the start that we're meant to laugh with this undercover brother as much as at him. ![]() (Surely this means Eddie Murphy had no hand in the production as well his idea of thigh-slapping guffaws more and more arrives in the form of fart jokes and the like.) Griffin plays the titular Undercover Brother, a snakeskin-and-platform-shoe wearing super soul brother whose sheer audacious charm would give Don King a run for his money. ![]() How do you parody a genre that as often as not is so over the top as to effectively be a parody of itself already? Lee (cousin to Spike) tackles the blaxploitation films of the Seventies with enough good-humored gusto to pull this one off somehow, thanks in large part to Eddie Griffin's irresistibly cool panache and an above-average script (by John Ridley and Michael McCullers) that takes color-blind potshots at everything black, white, and all shades of gray without ever devolving into the kind of infantile scatological humor that's marred so many comedies of this stripe since the Zucker-Abrahams team behind the Airplane! series finally hung up their wings.
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