Chocolate City

‘Y’all seen Magic Mike right? Now we gonna add a little chocolate’ intones Michael Jai White before the opening credits of the movie. What he fails to mention is that they have also added a lot more cheese and a great deal of soap too in this all-black take off of the 2012 smash hit movie about a group of hot male strippers. The story follows a similar vein about a regular guy who reluctantly becomes an exotic dancer to discover that in fact that this is his natural calling and overnight becomes a big star.

In this movie our man Michael is a Grade A student who has a part time job in a hamburger joint to help support his mother who has just had her job cut and his older brother who has an complete aversion to work. He wants to have a girlfriend and his heart goes aflutter every time he sits next to Carmen in class but she will not go out on a date with him as he doesn’t have a car.

The family are about to have their power cut off when Michael is approached in the Men’s Room of a Club and offered a job (!) which he ends up taking. Actually at first he turns it down flat, but his greedy brother seeing how much money can be made, eggs his sibling to get on stage and strip in front of a packed crowd of black women all waving wads of dollar bills in the air.

Strangely enough given the nature of the job he, and most of the other strippers, finish their acts with their trousers still intact, but there are many points like this in this poorly written movie that simply do not seem to ring true. Having said that, all of the stripper/dancers are amazingly sensuous and their sexy routines are one of the only things that is so much hotter than they were in ‘Magic Mike’.

Now working late nights, Michael’s school work suffers so within weeks his grades in his French class go from A to D but on the plus side as he now has a set of wheels he finally gets laid so he does at least get to use some french letters.

His church going mother worries about Michael’s new found wealth as she and Carmen have no idea that he is getting it by just shaking his stuff for hoards of screaming ladies who cannot get enough of him.  His co-workers resent the fact that newbie Michael is promoted over them to get star billing and hence more money.  It is obvious though that it is all going to end in tears and quite quickly, although funny enough the two women in his life surprisingly take his eventual disclosure with no more than a mere bat of an eyelash.

Chocolate City is  cliched, packed full of stereotypes, and with such corny lines that you positively wince for the actors who have to trot them out. Like when Carmen asks why he kept the fact that this was the way he chose to get his family out of debt, Michael replies ‘I’m a man.  I can’t ask for help!’ Writer/director Jean-Claude La Marre is a man too, and he so should have asked for help with this movie.

In fairness the target audience for this movie is young black  women and I am anything but that. Also as I am going for complete disclosure I will admit that I thought that ‘Magic Mike’ was just a piece of really bad sex-less soft-porn and saw no ‘magic’ in it at all. Chocolate City does at least have some good routines plus  Michael is played by Robert Ri’chard who does have the most amazing washboard abs, even though he is a good churchgoing boy who keeps telling his mum how much he loves her.