Malcolm X said that you weaken black coffee by integrating it with white cream; if you put too much cream in it you won't even be sure if it's coffee you're drinking. If you were to make a beverage-related analogy about Mario Van Peebles's Baadasssss!, orange squash would be the drink of choice.

Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song was some kind of a movie. Director Melvin Van Peebles took his negative experience of the studio-based film industry, combined with his disgust with the portrayal of non-whites in cinema, and produced an iconic, groundbreaking independent film that was all his own. Sweet Sweetback broke all the rules: the hero was a black criminal who got away at the end, white cops were the villains, sex was explicitly celebrated. The film spawned a multitude of imitators (Superfly being the obvious example), and is the purer precursor of the cash-in 'blaxploitation' genre. Baadasssss! tells the story behind the making of Sweet Sweetback.

Baadasssss! is not a documentary, it is an odd combination of dramatic recreation and faux-interview (with actors playing the interviewees). The filmmakers are presented as a dysfunctional multiethinic family, with Baadasssss! director Mario Van Peebles taking the role of his father. Khleo Thomas plays the young Mario (a day-player in Sweet Sweetback); presumably Mario doesn't have any children who act! The film follows Melvin from being a hot-property Hollywood young gun post-Watermelon Man, to taking a risk as an edgy independent filmmaker, to struggling as a desperate director with no cash.

Where Sweet Sweetback was rough and uncompromising, Baadasssss! is formulaic, conventionally structured, and cloyingly scored. Even the original title (How to get the man's foot outta your ass!) has been considerably diluted. Baadasssss! is a film which would have us take it seriously, but contains far too much that is conventional or clichéed. The struggle of the filmmaker, his eventual triumph, and the 'I love you, son' moments make it smack of a TV movie or a bad take-off of Ed Wood.

This is not to say that Baadasssss! is all bad; the story is interesting enough to keep you hooked in, and there is the benefit of a strong supporting cast of familiar character actors (Saul Rubinek, David Alan Grier, Vincent Schiavelli, Len Lesser), but overall the film is a missed opportunity. Under the end credits we are treated to snippits of interviews with the real people involved – and surely this is where the real story lies? Maybe in the DVD.

The thing about orange squash is that, in its undiluted form, it is viscous, sweet, and hard to swallow. Then you add water, you make it more palatable, you make it weaker. Mario Van Peebles has made a film which will be far more acceptable to a wider audience and film distributors than his father's masterpiece, but the virtues it celebrates in Sweet Sweetback – fire, originality, and uncompromised vision – are sadly lacking. Too much water has been added. This is a story that deserves to be told, but it deserves better than this.

Rate TBC (see IFCO website for details)
Baadasssss! is released on 15th July 2005.
Baadasssss! – Official website