4/10
A story about revenge isn't always a plotline.
4 June 2021
Warning: Spoilers
There are a ton of great action scenes in this movie and lots of shoot-ups and great location footage, with the movie starting off downtown and moving to midtown before we even see Harlem at 164th Street. This sequel to "Black Caesar" has Fred Williamson being set up for assassination by New York City politicians (led by big daytime star Gerald Gordon of "The Doctors") and then pretty much all we get are a bunch of shootouts between the black gangs and the white criminals, one somewhere on an island off the coast of Florida where the silly looking shots of a black maid taking aim and shooting various guests are impossible to get out of your head, especially when she serves soul food to the survivors and they look at it in disgust.

Then there are more random shootings, a plot distraction involving Williamson, now involved with pretty Gloria Hendry, and the indication that Williamson is now respectable. The plot by this time is going all over the place, characters are brought in for various reasons that aren't made clear, and the action that made the muddled first 45 minutes enjoyable completely stops. You know what's going to be more of the same, and by this time, you realize that a lot of the goings on really serve no purpose other than to set up more violence.

It was interesting to see Gerald Gordon probably doing this film on his days off from NBC at 30 Rock being such a bad guy. He still is basically playing a variation of Nick Bellini and Mark Dante, his physicians from both "The Doctors" and "General Hospital", but he ends up being one of the great villains ever in a blaxploitation movie. Margaret Avery, who went on to create the role of shug Avery in "The Color Purple", has a memorable small role. But I would have to call this a disappointment, having seen a dozen or so blaxploitation movies, and the lack of a concrete strong plot is the film's mistake. Larry Cohen returns from the first film as director, and it's obvious he is adept at directing intense action sequences, but they should have worked on the script a bit more before going before a camera.
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