The script by Dillard and producer Alex Theurer has a novel solution to their hero’s dilemma. When Bo misses the deadline, Angelo’s gang kidnaps Tina. Holly bonds with Tina, but Bo’s debts to Angelo throw him into a race to pay them back. On the street performing, Bo meets Holly (Seychelle Gabriel), who is beaten back and blue by her alcoholic mother. Parallel to the drug-dealing plot is a love story. It will take more to generate interest for the film outside the US. Yet the element of magic – handled skillfully by Latimore and by Dillard, a magician since childhood - is enough of a novelty and an expansion of the gangbanger playbook to give Sleight some legs. It’s a bad-ass movie, oozing with blood, yet can be cloyingly earnest and wholesome at its core, so much so that Dillard’s debut sometimes feels like an audition tape for Disney.Įven without any explicit sex, there’s plenty profanity and violence to keep the movie out of the reach of pre-teens in theatres. He can pick anyone’s pocket – and does – but he can’t get himself and his daughter out of the ghetto and into a better school system.
Whats in that box in the movie sleight of hand tv#
Think of the 1970’s TV character McGiver, as a young African-American with a deck of cards. Sleight, filmed on a slight budget, is an odd amalgam, a gangster drama set on the streets, with a protagonist who solves his problems with magic tricks. Things get complicated when the ruthless dealer Angelo (Dule Hill) brings Bo into his crew. But bills are hard to pay with card tricks, so Bo sells coke. Both of his parents are dead, and Bo is the sole support for his young sister, the adorable Tina. The hero of Sleight is Bo (Jacob Latimore), a skilled magician with an inventor’s knack for taking his talent into electro-mechanics. The element of magic is enough of a novelty and an expansion of the gangbanger playbook to give Sleight some legs It has plenty of heart and lots of fighting, but could use a little more magic. There's an effortlessness that Jacob brought to it that made Jacob feel real to me pretty quickly.Sleight is a first feature about a street conjurer who gets caught up with drug dealers. As subtle as Jacob's performance often is, it is always navigating about one of five worlds that he lives in. We needed someone charismatic to be performing magic in front of people, but then tender enough to be speaking with his little sister, then to talk about science, also to jump into the crime world and not just seem like a total square. He has this incredible quality-this chameleon-like quality where he can feel at home in a number of different environments.
How did Jacob get involved? Were you familiar with him before you were casting the film? A big reason that character is so compelling is obviously Jacob Latimore's performance. One of many things I love about the film is how complex Bo is. Jacob Latimore and Seychelle Gabriel in Sleight With genre specifically, that is something that I am working toward figuring out. flashes of stories that are familiar but through a point of view that you're maybe a little less accustomed to. I think it is important for people to see flashes of things that are familiar to them, but led by people of color, or by women. Not every story needs to be innately about the black experience, but really just making movies with different people and different faces. I really want to use genre to contribute to that conversation. In terms of my own approach to diversity in film-in Sleight having a voice, and subsequently, hopefully giving me one a little bit as well, I'm definitely thinking about what my contribution to this conversation is. To see what Moonlight and Get Out have done in the past year has been truly inspiring. One of the incredible things that Moonlight does is humanize characters who we've seen flashes of before to such a serious degree. All three of those movies are very different. Do you think mainstream tastes and what's considered popular entertainment might be changing? Moonlight, like Sleight, was about characters who have generally been relegated to the fringes of movies in the past.
Some critics and observers have made connections between Sleight and two other popular recent films: Get Out was made on a very small budget and became a hit.
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