The American Society of Magical Negroes

Grade: D

The American Society of Magical Negroes is chock full of clumsy, cringy moments. It opens with a character who is palpably nervous and uncomfortable in his own skin. He is Aren (Justice Smith, from Pokémon: Detective Pikachu and the last couple Jurassic Worlds). He’s an aspiring artist at a show, trying to get some buyers for his piece. Nobody talks to him, except the director telling him to loosen up and not be so tense. The only other person there who looks like him is working behind the bar. A white man, mistaking Aaron for “the help,” hands him his empty champagne glass.

The bartender is Roger, played by David Alan Grier. It’s nice to see him back in front of the camera again, after being the voice of the Oscar ceremony these last few years. He sees potential in Aren for some reason. The audience sure doesn’t. He inducts Aren into a secret club called The American Society of Magical Negroes. Their headquarters is accessed through a private door in a barber shop. It’s a vast, Hogwarts-style place, and the members travel through space and sometimes time to provide their service. Their philosophy is there’s nothing more dangerous than a white person who is uncomfortable, so they go on missions to befriend a Caucasian buddy and diffuse them.

Aren is assigned to a white guy named Jason. He’s a designer at a Facebook-like social media company. Jason is very interested in a co-worker named Lizzie (a great An-Li Bogan). This is quite the coincidence, because a couple of scenes before, Aren and Lizzie have a Meet Cute at a coffee shop. She spills her drink when they bump into each other. Now they are working together, and Aren likes her too.

There’s an Almost Kiss bit, that gets interrupted just before the moment of truth. Apparently not everyone believes Almost Kisses in movies got old 30 years ago. If a Magical Negro gets too personally invested in their assignment, it causes the magic to shut down for everyone, across the board. Back at the headquarters, the president – who usually levitates when making her speeches to the team – makes reference after reference to having to sit on a high chair to address everybody. Aside from some amusing callbacks to The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Green Mile, and Driving Miss Daisy, almost every scene falls flat.

So many of them are awkwardly written and delivered. There’s one between Aren and Jason that is circular, annoying, and often both. They are playing a VR game near a staircase, and it hints at a payoff that never arrives. In the climactic scene, characters talk at the same time so much that I didn’t know whose prattling to focus on – never mind how an outburst like that was allowed to continue on a worldwide corporate livestream. Characters forgive too easily for a cutesy, tidy, hasty ending, but I was just glad to be out of The American Society of Magical Negroes. It not only doesn’t have magic, but lacks humor, heart, smarts, and an effective way to say what it wants to say.

Grade: D