It's an outstanding movie in terms of the direction, the story, the musical score. I mean everything about this movie works, IMO. It's a solid 8.5 out of 10 type of movie and I really liked it...as a completely fictional movie, which I had to turn my brain off and absorb it as.
Unfortunately, after the movie was over and my brain processed it more fully as social commentary on the real world, it dropped to like a 2/10. You know how the original has plenty of racial overtones, ya? Well, they cranked that up to 11 for this one. It's basically nonstop social commentary and racial overtones. The villain of the movie isn't the Candyman, it's white people and the police. Police are CONSTANTLY portrayed as the real threat.
The cast is almost entirely black, which is fine, and are all portrayed as being super-intelligent socialites...which is fine, but when contrasted with how most of the white people in the movie were portrayed as violent thugs, it quickly starts to come off as propaganda. When the characters in the movie talk about other people they always mention the person's race. Like when they call back to the original movie and go "A woman came to Cabrini-Green...a white woman" very dramatically.
Someone calls the police because someone else is injured? You expect the police to show up and administer medical care or something. Not in this movie! They'll have the sound of police sirens slowly escalating in the distance until it's blaring over everything like some sort of menacing Nazgul screech, then police will burst into the room and open fire for no reason whatsoever.
The main character's name is Breonna, I think, which is so on-the-nose. After police shoot her boyfriend for absolutely no reason, they tell her that she better tell investigators that "he was coming at us with a weapon" or else. It's like...body cameras are a thing that exist, yet apparently none of the cops in this movie are ever wearing one.
The very first scene of the movie, IIRC, is one of the main characters as a kid playing with paper dolls and having a cop chase a black guy who is going "I didn't do nothing!"
The movie borders on self-parody if you're watching as someone informed on the true nature of BLM and so on in the modern era. Literally everything is attributed to race in this movie. There's a scene where they talk about how the failed state of the projects is white people's fault, because "white people give us the projects, then they cut us off from help and let us die, then they move in and turn it into a Whole Foods". Like this revolving circle of logic that doesn't entirely stand up to scrutiny but everyone in the movie follows it.
The end credits are a montage of black people being horribly killed in all sorts of brutal ways by white people throughout history. It's all animated because Lord knows 80+% of the things they show you probably never happened. I had to get up and leave at that point cause it was like "we get it"
As a fictional movie, it's good. However, know that if you see it you'll be subjected to a two-hour propaganda screed. They set up further sequels as well, since there are now lots of Candymen (as a new Candyman is created every time a black person is brutally killed by white people). They also tried to make the Candyman into the hero of the story rather than a monster, sort of this avenging reckoning. Almost everyone he kills in the movie are white people, and the final scene is him going on a rampage and brutally killing like a dozen police.
If nothing else it might be worth seeing because it's such a window into what the purveyors of the modern era want everyone to think and believe. The opening credits are a pan of an upside-down city and it's pretty fitting considering how "through the looking glass" we are with this shit.
