Outlaw Johnny Black

Fourteen years after 'Black Dynamite', Michael Jai White teamed up with Byron Minns again to take apart another genre of the seventies. 'Outlaw Johnny Black' is what came of it, a western comedy White wrote, directed, produced and starred in, and the first release from his own company, Jaigantic Studios. It opened in American cinemas in September 2023 through Samuel Goldwyn Films and reached British screens that December.

The Johnny Black of the title grew up watching his parents make a living as trick shooters. A gunman called Brett Clayton challenged his father, a preacher as well as a marksman, to a quick draw and shot him while he was unarmed. Decades on, he is still swearing revenge and still getting into trouble for doing the right thing, until there is a wanted poster with his name on it.

Having slipped the noose by a whisker, Johnny runs into Percy out in the desert, a reverend heading for Hope Springs to meet the woman he has been writing to for years. The two get separated, Johnny reaches the town first, and nobody there knows what the new preacher looks like. He takes the name, the pulpit and the fiancée, Bessie Lee, and soon works out that a land baron named Tom Sheally is squeezing the townsfolk off their property. Bessie's sister, Jessie Lee, is the one running the town's legal fight, and she is the one he listens to.

Anika Noni Rose and Erica Ash play the Lee sisters, Minns is the real reverend and Chris Browning the villain. Around them are Barry Bostwick as the land baron, Glynn Turman as Johnny's father, Kym Whitley, Randy Couture and a brief Michael Madsen. White shot on ranches around Santa Clarita that still keep their western streets standing, and he has said the score came out of an archive of unused Italian western music, Ennio Morricone among the composers, which he reached through his musical director, David Hollander.

White's reference points take in 'Buck and the Preacher', the western Sidney Poitier directed, and above all 'Once Upon a Time in the West', which he reckons he has watched forty times. It opened on 307 screens in North America and finished a little over 300,000 dollars. Reviews split down the middle: most of them praise White's handling of the action and his comic timing, and most of them ask for cuts in an edit that runs past two hours. Erica Ash died in July 2024, aged 46, less than a year after the premiere.

• Action
• Comedy
• Western