Black Lightning review (DVD) ★★

Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Grigoriy Dobrygin, Ekaterina Vilkova, Viktor Verzhbitskiy, Valeriy Zolotukhin, Ekaterina Vasileva,
Juozas Budraitis, Ivan Zhidkov, Sergey Garmash, Ekaterina Starshova | Written by Dmitriy Aleynikov & Aleksandr Talal
UK Certification PG | UK RRP £24.99 | Runtime 423 minutes | Directed by Dmitriy Kiselev & Aleksandr Voytinskiy

You could call Black Lightning a Russian Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the 21st century, but at the same time you could also call it a complete and utter rip-off of Sam Raimi's Spider-man trilogy. You may ask what the similarities are between a flying car and the web-slinging superhero, but they are all too prominent in this film, which, contrary to what the title may infer, is not a blaxploitation movie.

When an Average Joe university student is bought an old banger of a car for his birthday, Dima (Dobrygin) could never have anticipated its ability to launch into the sky and take flight. But one of his lecturers could - a multimillionaire bent on taking a huge deposit of diamonds from beneath Moscow, and at any cost as his nanofuel-powered drill will cause the destruction of the city if it pushes any further through the earth, towards the vein of stones. Out of fuel, the greedy businessman desperately attempts to locate the heart-shaped nano catalyst and soon discovers that it was put inside the decrepit Volga. Meanwhile, Dima's father is stabbed to death by a mugger, his loss pushing him to use his car for superheroic deeds. Garnering a huge reputation in the city after the news broadcasts the car in all its airborne glory, the media refers to the publicly-unidentified Dima as Black Lightning, as he goes about his crusade for good.

Key elements from the Spider-man films are rather blatantly lifted. The plot is the same as the original instalment to the extent that the protagonist is a college kid with the hots for a girl who would never normally be interested in him (Peter Parker and Mary Jane), and the antagonist is a man who said protagonist greatly looks up to and respects (Harry Osborn/The Green Goblin and Dr. Octavius/Doc Ock). I hope you already noticed that Dima's dad's murder in the street is exactly what happens in the first Spider-man. And you know the sequence in Spider-man 2 where Parker's delivering pizzas by swinging through the city instead of using his moped, which caused him to almost be fired? Black Lightning's answer to that is flying through Moscow delivering flowers after driving was on the verge of costing him his job. There is just so much copying that it would be incredibly ignorant to pass it all off as paying homage to inspirations – it's outright plagiarism – and when a film follows such an identical story to an inferior degree, it makes you just want to pop Spider-man into your player instead. Even the soundtrack sounds like a less emphatic compilation of Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer's scores from Spider-man and Batman Begins respectively.

It's not that the film is totally awful, as, your-friendly-neighbourhood-nano-car story aside, it's well made and has some excellent CGI being a special effects-heavy movie. I've seen so many films with decent budgets come out of Russia with hideous digital effects, so this is a refreshing watch from that point of view. Still, it really is just a little sense-making ???????-???? starring the spitting image of Hayden Christensen, and that oversized hoody does little to make the actor look anything other than Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith.

EXTRAS ?? Deleted scenes and a 25-minute making-of feature.