Spence Moore II Archives

Review: ‘Back on the Strip,’ starring Wesley Snipes, J.B. Smoove, Gary Owen, Bill Bellamy, Spence Moore II, Raigan Harris, Faizon Love and Tiffany Haddish

August 18, 2023

by Carla Hay

Spence Moore II in “Back on the Strip” (Photo courtesy of GVN Releasing and Luminosity Entertainment)

Directed by Chris Spencer

Culture Representation: Taking place in Las Vegas and in Los Angeles, the comedy film “Back on the Strip” features a cast of predominantly African American people (with some white people, Asians and Latinos ) portraying the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A young, aspiring magician moves from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and gets a job as a stripper in an all-male reunited group of middle-aged strippers.

Culture Audience: “Back on the Strip” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and enjoy watching idiotic movies that have a non-stop barrage of mindless dialogue and plotlines that make African Americans look trashy and stupid.

Tiffany Haddish and Spence Moore II in “Back on the Strip” (Photo courtesy of GVN Releasing and Luminosity Entertainment)

The filmmakers of “Back on the Strip” should have put this rotten screenplay back in the garbage where it belongs. This very unfunny comedy panders to negative racial stereotypes and looks like it’s from the mind of an emotionally stunted teenager. The plot gets worse and worse as it goes along, until the last third of the film just becomes a steaming pile of wretched stupidity.

Directed by Chris Spencer (who co-wrote the atrocious screenplay with Eric Daniel), “Back on the Strip” isn’t just a comedy with very stale and outdated jokes. It’s also quite boring and a waste of time for a movie that’s nearly two hours long and doesn’t have anything interesting to say. “Back on the Strip” is Spencer’s feature-film directorial debut, after he directed a handful of episodes for TV series such as TV One’s “Uncensored” and BET’s “Real Husbands of Hollywood.” Many of the cast members of “Back on the Strip” have celebrity name recognition, but they’ve also been in plenty of bad movies. “Back on the Strip” is another in a long list of their embarrassing flops.

In “Back on the Strip,” the annoying narrator is Verna Owens (played by Tiffany Haddish, one of the movie’s producers), a single mother living in Los Angeles with her young adult son Jason Owens (played by Spence Moore II), whose nickname is Merlin. He has this nickname because he’s been obsessed with becoming a professional magician, ever since he was 15 years old. In the beginning of the movie, Merlin is 20.

Verna says and does a lot of things that are cringeworthy in how they make African American women look low-class and ignorant. This junkpile movie doesn’t care to mention or show how Verna makes money. The “Back on the Strip” filmmakers made Verna’s only purpose in the movie to be a nasty stereotype of what racist people think most African American women are like. In other words, Haddish is doing more of her ghetto-minded schtick in a low-quality movie.

In the narration, Verna describes Merlin this way: “He only cares about two things: magic and Robin.” Actually, Robin isn’t a “thing.” She’s a human being. Robin (played by Raigan Harris) is Merlin’s girlfriend, and she’s completely supportive of Merlin’s dreams to become a magician. Robin has her own career goals: She wants to become a professional dancer and is attending the prestigious arts university Juilliard in New York City. Merlin worries that the long distance will end their relationship.

Merlin has entered a talent contest where he will do his magician act. Verna has accompanied him. Before going on stage, Merlin is taunted by a group of young white rappers saying that Merlin looks like a clown in his magician’s outfit. The group is led by an obnoxious bully (played by Alex Kersting), who calls Verna an “old lady” and a “bitch.” She reacts to these insults by hitting the bully leader on the head with her fist.

During the talent contest, Merlin is on stage for less than a minute when the bully leader, who’s watching backstage from stage left, gets revenge by pulling down Merlin’s trousers and underwear. (There is no actual nudity in “Back on the Strip.”) With his private parts exposed to the audience, Merlin is humiliated and runs off stage. He doesn’t notice an elderly woman in the audience standing and cheering, as she shouts that Merlin is “blessed” in his genital area. “Back on the Strip” makes several references to Merlin having a large penis.

In the beginning of the movie, Merlin repeatedly tells people that he’s not a clown when dressed as a magician. After his embarrassment at the talent show, “Back on the Strip” fast forwards to four years later, when 24-year-old Merlin actually is a clown. He’s at a kiddie birthday party, and he’s dressed as a clown who does magic tricks.

And here comes another “Merlin’s got a large penis” gag: The birthday girl’s unnamed father (played Kevin Hart) gets annoyed and starts yelling at Merlin because Merlin’s big bulge can be seen in Merlin’s trousers when he’s jumping on a trampoline. Some of the women at the party like what they see though. Needless to say, Merlin gets fired from this party job.

Merlin gets even worse news when he attends a party for Robin, who drops a bombshell: She’s dating a conceited actor named Blaze (played by Ryan Alexander Holmes), who’s also a social media star because of his viral videos and his TV prank show. Robin is a dance mentor on a dance talent contest called “Hollywood and Grind,” which is described in the movie as “Dancing With the Stars” for black people. Blaze was paired with Robin, and the two of them began dating each other. Robin also has a meddling best friend named Gia (played by Piper Curda), who has a secret infatuation with Blaze.

Merlin is crushed by the news that Robin has a new boyfriend, and he feels very inadequate compared to Blaze. At the party, Merlin impulsively makes up a lie and tells Robin and some other party attendees that he has a magician job in Las Vegas. Verna overhears Merlin tells this lie and decides to do something about it, with the hope that it will also help ease Merlin’s heartbreak over Robin: Verna gives Merlin a one-way plane ticket to Las Vegas.

Verna used to work in Las Vegas and refers Merlin to a former co-worker named Rita (played by Colleen Camp), a disheveled marijuana smoker who currently owns a run-down hotel called the Vagrant Inn Vegas. A “joke” in the movie is that the hotel’s outdoor sign only has these letters lit up: “vag” in Vagrant, “in” in Inn and “a” in Vegas. Merlin lives at the hotel and notices that the letters “vag,” “in” and “a” put together spell “vagina.” This revelation is supposed to be “hilarious” in the movie.

Merlin convinces a reluctant Rita to let him do his magic act one night at the hotel’s nearly deserted bar/nightclub. The audience consists of less than seven people. Merlin does his act and bombs with the audience. But then once again, his trousers come down when they catch on fire (don’t ask), the women in the audience see how “well-endowed” Merlin is, and suddenly, they love the show.

Also witnessing this spectacle is Luther Ellis (played by Wesley Snipes, one of the producers of “Back on the Strip”), a former member of an all-male stripper group called the Chocolate Chips, who were very popular in Las Vegas about 30 years ago. Luther’s stage name in the group was Mr. Big. After seeing Merlin’s physique, Luther gets the idea to reunite the Chocolate Chips and add Merlin as a new member. Luther, who uses a cane because of a leg injury, will not be a dancer in this reunited group, but he will be the group’s manager and emcee.

Merlin says no at first to Luther’s stripper job offer, until Merlin changes his mind because he needs the money. “Back on the Strip” then goes through very tedious and not-funny-at-all sequences of Luther and Merlin tracking down the other former members of the Chocolate Chips, who all still live in the Las Vegas area. Each former member has something about himself that makes him a less-than-ideal candidate for this stripper reunion.

Desmond “Da Body” Day (played by Faizon Love) was known for being the most physically fit member of the Chocolate Chips. Desmond is now very overweight. Tyriq “Da Face” Cox (played by Bill Bellamy) was known as the “pretty boy” of the Chocolate Chips. Now, Tyriq is a happily married father who’s busy with infant quadruplet daughters.

Amos “Slim Sexy” Fowler (played by J.B. Smoove) was known for being the raunchiest dancer when he was a member of the Chocolate Chips. Now, Amos is a born-again Christian pastor with an equally religious wife named Eve Fowler (played by Caryn Ward), who knows about Amos’ past as a stripper. Eve immensely dislikes the thought of Amos being a stripper. Eve used to be Desmond’s girlfriend. There’s a useless subplot of Desmond and Eve going on platonic dates together without Amos knowing.

The Chocolate Chips got their name because they were marketed as a stripper group consisting only of black men. One of the group’s former members is Xander (played by Gary Owen), whose stripper stage name was Dr. X. Xander is now a real-life doctor (he’s a plastic surgeon) with a trophy wife named Bambi (played by Emelina Adams), who looks like she’s no stranger to plastic surgery.

The “joke” about Xander is that when he was in the Chocolate Chips, he always wore a full-face mask. Now, all these years later, his former Chocolate Chip mates are shocked to find out that Xander is white. (Xander used dark makeup and tanning on the rest of his body to pass himself of as a black man while working as a stripper.)

The rest of “Back on the Strip” shows this ragtag group of middle-aged strippers and a young newcomer (Merlin’s stripper stage name is Black Magic), as the Chocolate Chips make a comeback, beginning in Rita’s tacky hotel nightclub. Meanwhile, Robin and Blaze get engaged. And then, the Chocolate Chips are hired to work at a bachelorette party. You know where this is going, of course.

“Back on the Strip” could have actually been a very entertaining film because the movie’s overall concept had the potential to be a good movie. Unfortunately, “Back on the Strip” is such an unrelenting pile-on of idiocy and terrible jokes, there’s no redeeming it, no matter how many famous people are in the cast. The stripping scenes are lackluster, the acting is unimpressive, and there are asinine plot developments that truly insult viewers’ intelligence.

Don’t expect to see much of Merlin’s so-called “magician’s talent” in the movie, which shoves the magician storyline out of the way to make room for the stripper storyline. The magician storyline is only brought back briefly toward the end of the movie. By then, most viewers won’t really care. The only real magic act in “Back on the Strip” is how it makes any quality filmmaking disappear the more this witless abomination drags on to its irritating end.

GVN Releasing and Luminosity Entertainment released “Back on the Strip” in U.S. cinemas on August 18, 2023.

Review: ‘Creed III,’ starring Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson and Jonathan Majors

February 23, 2023

by Carla Hay

“Creed III”

Directed by Michael B. Jordan

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area in the early 2020s (with flashbacks to 2000 and 2015), the dramatic film “Creed III” features a predominantly African American cast of characters (with some white people and Latinos) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Retired boxing champ Adonis “Donnie” Creed comes out of retirement to fight his former childhood friend Damian “Dame” Anderson, who has a jealousy-fueled vendetta against Adonis.

Culture Audience: “Creed III” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Creed”/”Rocky” franchise, the movie’s headliners, and boxing movies that show the emotional toll of keeping dark secrets and the down sides of fame and fortune.

Michael B. Jordan, Mila Davis-Kent and Tessa Thompson in “Creed III” (Photo by Eli Ade/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)

“Creed III” serves up more of the franchise’s winning combination of family drama, boxing fights and friendship loyalty. The movie might disappoint viewers who are expecting more boxing scenes, but Adonis Creed’s complicated past gets a worthy spotlight. Michael B. Jordan, who stars as Adonis “Donnie” Creed, makes an impressive feature-film directorial debut with “Creed III,” a movie that is the most psychologically intricate movie in the “Creed” franchise so far. Fans of boxing movies should know in advance there’s a lot more talking than boxing action in “Creed III,” which has only three big boxing matches and several flashbacks to Adonis’ childhood.

The “Creed” franchise (a spinoff from the “Rocky” movie franchise) began with 2015’s “Creed” and continued with 2018’s “Creed II.” With “Creed III,” the filmmakers (including “Creed III” screenwriters Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin) give a lot of screen time to Adonis’ backstory to explain why he is so conflicted when a former childhood friend shows up in Adonis’ life again after the friend spent 18 years in prison. It helps (but it’s not essential) to see the previous “Creed” movies before seeing “Creed III,” because these previous movies give better context to Adonis’ relationship with his loyal wife Bianca Creed (played by Tessa Thompson) and their daughter Amara Creed (played by Mila Davis-Kent), who both happen to have hearing disabilities.

“Creed III” (which takes place in the Los Angeles area) begins with a flashback to 2000, when 15-year-old Adonis (played by as Thaddeus James Mixson Jr.) was a foster kid getting caught up in a lot of shady activities. At the time, Adonis’ best friend was 18-year-old Damian “Dame” Anderson (played by Spence Moore II), whom Adonis admired immensely. Adonis and Dame have a younger brother/older brother type of relationship. But they both run with a rough crowd and spend a lot of time doing risky, illegal activities. Dame was the first person who taught Adonis how to be a boxer.

One night, Adonis sees a middle-aged man named Leon (played by Aaron Alexander) outside of a liquor store. Dame is somewhere nearby. Leon looks intoxicated and oblivious as he walks by Adonis, as if he didn’t really see Adonis at all. Adonis angrily says to Leon, “You don’t remember me, do you?” And the next thing you know, Adonis attacks Leon and starts beating him viciously.

What happened that night is shown in other flashbacks that eventually reveal the entire story. It’s enough to say that what happened that night drastically changed the courses of Adonis’ life and Dame’s life. And it’s something that Adonis wants to forget, but he will have to face it when Dame suddenly and unexpectedly comes back into Adonis’ life, after Dame (played by Jonathan Majors) has spent 18 years in prison. Dame reconnects with Adonis the week after Dame got out of prison.

As already revealed in the “Creed III” trailer, the reunion of Adonis and Dame becomes a rekindled friendship that turns sour and leads to Adonis and Dame facing off as enemies inside and outside the boxing ring. The rift in their rekindled friendship happens about halfway through the movie. People who see the “Creed III” trailer before seeing the movie might wonder why it takes so long to get to the conflicts between Adonis and Dame.

For better or worse, “Creed” (which has a total running time of 116 minutes) takes its time in exploring issues such as urban poverty, social class prejudices, and African American male experiences in friendships, rivalries and the criminal justice system. It’s a lot of issues to cover, in addition to bringing back previous “Creed” movie characters and their storylines, introducing new characters, and showing a different side of Adonis without fundamentally changing who he is. Fortunately, the writing, directing, and film editing (by Jessica Baclesse and Tyler Nelson) of “Creed III” blend everything together in a way that’s seamless but a little long-winded.

After “Creed III” begins with flashbacks to Adonis’ life in 2000 (when he was 15 years old), the movie shows a flashback to 2015, when a 30-year-old Adonis won his first heavyweight boxing championship. In 2023, Adonis is happily retired, wealthy, and running a boxing training center called the Delphi Academy with Tony “Little Duke” Burton (played by Wood Harris), who has a shared generational history with Adonis. Little Duke was Adonis’ former cornerman, just like Little Duke’s father Duke was a cornerman for Adonis’ father Apollo Creed, Rocky Balboa’s most famous boxing competitor from 1976’s Oscar-winning “Rocky” and 1979’s “Rocky II.”

When Dame comes back into Adonis’ life, Dame makes Adonis feel guilty for Adonis not keeping in touch with Dame while Dame was in prison. Before he was sent to prison, Dame was a Golden Gloves (amateur boxing) champ, and he’s bitter that his boxing career was cut short because of his prison sentence. Now in his early 40s, Dame is considered too old to try to become a professional boxer, but he tells Adonis that it’s his goal anyway. Dame convinces Adonis to let Dame train at Delphi Academy.

Two people are very wary and skeptical about Dame being back in Adonis’ life, because they don’t think that Dame can be trusted. The first skeptic is Little Duke, who thinks that Dame is a loose cannon who fights dirty in the ring. Little Duke also thinks it’s foolish to invest time and money in Dame’s training. Dame is unemployed and broke when he gets out of prison, so Adonis is essentially paying for all of Dame’s boxing expenses.

The other person who doesn’t trust Dame is Adonis’ stepmother Mary-Anne Creed (played by Phylicia Rashad), Apollo’s widow who took 23-year-old Adonis out of a detention center in 1998 and let him live with her in her Bel-Air mansion. Adonis’ biological mother, who died when he was a child, was Apollo’s mistress. As shown in the first “Creed” movie, Mary-Anne and Adonis became so close, she began to treat him like he was her own biological son, and he eventually started calling her his mother.

Mary-Anne knows about Adonis and Dame’s shady past together, and she thinks of Dame as a bad influence, then and now. Soon after Dame and Adonis reconnect, Dame asks Adonis if Adons received any of the letters that Dame wrote to Adonis during Dame’s prison term. Adonis said he never got the letters, which were sent to the mansion where he used to live with Mary-Anne. It’s very easy to figure out what happened to those letters.

Adonis is a mentor to the current world heavyweight boxing champ: Felix Chavez (played by Jose Benavidez), who is managed by his outspoken mother Laura Chavez (played by Selenis Leyva), who is as ambitious and hard-working as her son. Felix’s biggest challenger for the heavyweight title is Viktor Drago (played by Florian Munteanu), who was Adonis’ main opponent in “Creed II.”

Viktor has a small but pivotal role in “Creed III.” Viktor, the son of notorious Ivan Drago (who fought Rocky in 1985’s “Rocky IV”) is supposed to be face off with Felix in a high-profile world heavyweight championship boxing match. However, something happens that prevents Viktor from doing this boxing match. What happens after that changes the trajectory of Dame’s boxing career and leads to the downfall of his friendship with Adonis.

Jordan (who is also a producer of “Creed III”) gives his best performance so far as Adonis in a “Creed” movie. It’s a richly layered performance that looks authentic and well-earned, after years of Jordan portraying this character. Thompson is very good in her role as Bianca, but she has a lot less to do in “Creed III” than she did in “Creed” (which showed the Adonis/Bianca courtship) and “Creed II,” which showed the early years of their marriage and the birth of Amara.

As the troubled and emotionally wounded Dame, Majors brings realistic nuances to this role that don’t make him a typical “villain” in a boxing movie. Dame is a product of his poverty-filled environment and of his personality. He can be intensely loyal, but he can be intensely vengeful. He’s also a messy cauldron of angst, pride, sadness and vulnerability. On the one hand, Dame still wants a friendship with Adonis. On the other hand, he’s jealous of Adonis, who has the fame and fortune that Dame thinks could have been Dame’s too.

Both men have used boxing as a way to cope with tough circumstances and their life problems, but the movie shows how Adonis’ status as a celebrity millionaire does not protect him from his past or how he is viewed in the world as an African American man. Adonis is a role model now, but he knows that things could have turned out very differently under other circumstances. Meanwhile, Dame’s prison record as a convicted felon automatically makes him a society outcast in some ways, by making him unable to vote and get certain jobs.

Adonis and Dame started out with similar lifestyles, but their current social class divide (and Dame’s envy about it) is shown in telling scenes. Dame and Adonis have their first reunion meal at local diner in a low-income neighborhood that the two used to frequent when they were teenagers. Dame comments to Adonis, “I’m surprised you’re still here with the common folk.”

Later, Adonis invites Dame to the mansion were Adonis lives with Bianca and Amara. Dame seems both impressed by and jealous of Adonis’s privileged and happy life. It further fuels Dame into thinking that he was robbed of having this type of life because of what happened that fateful night in 2000. Dame insists that Adonis should help Dame get a shot at winning a boxing title.

As for Amara and Bianca, they’re not exactly sidelined, but their storylines in “Creed III” are secondary to what’s going on between Adonis and Dame. Amara is a singer/musician who has successfully transitioned from being a performer to being a music producer because of her partial hearing condition. Amara mentions how painful it was for her to give up performing on stage, but her feelings about this issue are never fully explored in “Creed III.”

Amara is a lively and intelligent “daddy’s girl,” who eagerly learns how to box and takes Adonis’ self-defense advice to heart. The movie has multiple scenes of Amara doing shadow boxing training with Adonis. It all seems like a blatant set-up for a future “Creed” movie about Amara when she’s an adult and inevitably becomes a boxer. Someone call Laila Ali (daughter of Muhammad Ali) for advice.

Amara’s fight skills cause problems when Amara punches a girl classmate who bullies Amara by stealing a drawing that Amara made and ripping up the drawing in front of Amara. A parent-teacher meeting about this fight shows the different parenting styles of Adonis (who doesn’t have a problem with what Amara did) and Bianca, who does have a problem with it. Bianca feels that she has to be the parent to teach Amara that throwing punches isn’t always the best way to resolve a fight.

There’s also friction between Bianca and Adonis later in the movie, because he won’t open up and tell her all the details about what happened in the incident that landed Dame in prison. This incident is the root cause of all the hard feelings between these two on-again/off-again friends. Previous “Creed” movies only hinted at Adonis’ difficult past. “Creed III” is a deep dive into it.

Is this a psychological drama or a boxing movie? It’s both. The boxing scenes are adrenaline-packed and thrilling, of course, but “Creed III” is also concerned with showing how fame and fortune can affect relationships but can’t change the past and can’t change how people fundamentally feel about themselves. It’s a hard lesson that Adonis has to learn, even if it comes at a painful cost of having a friend turn into an enemy. “Creed III” is by no means the end of the “Creed” franchise, but it does close a chapter on Adonis’ toughest fight of reconciling his past with his present.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures will release “Creed III” in U.S. cinemas on March 3, 2023.