Blaxploitation Education: Three the Hard Way

Having three top Blaxploitation stars team up is a great idea, but they deserved a better plot than this.

Three the Hard Way
Written by Eric Bercovici and Jerry Ludwig
Directed by Gordon Parks, Jr.
1974

By 1974, there were enough recognizable Blaxploitation stars that a few of them could be grouped together, Avengers-style, to co-star in an action movie. That seems to be the idea behind Three the Hard Way anyway, which unites Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and Jim Kelly to fight a racist plot. Interestingly, the first two were established stars, having headlined several movies each, but Kelly was still relatively new to the scene, having only starred in Black Belt Jones and been featured in a few other minor roles. But he was clearly a great performer, with dynamic karate moves and a badass attitude to match, so everyone must have figured he was ready to stand alongside the bigger names. And fortunately, they were right, at least as far as this movie goes.

While the three leads work well together, and they get to have lots of fun being action stars, the movie itself doesn’t really live up to the expectations it sets. It has a plot that’s pretty dumb and villains whose ineptitude is only matched by their overconfidence. It sets up a threat that should be horrific and then makes it seem all too easy to overcome by a few motivated guys. But we’ll get to that.

We begin with an odd scene that had me wondering if I was accidentally watching the wrong movie. There’s a Black guy who is being held prisoner by what seem to be prison guards or soldiers, but they’re in an out-of-the-way motel or something rather than anything resembling an actual prison. He manages to escape, first by hiding among the bodies of some other Black men who have been disturbingly piled in a garage and then by grabbing a gun and shooting his way out. He takes a bullet on the way, and he manages to commandeer the car of a young couple, forcing them to drive him to someone who can provide some help.

That person turns out to be Jimmy Lait (Jim Brown), a Los Angeles music producer who is interrupted while canoodling with his girlfriend Wendy (Sheila Frazier, from Super Fly). Jimmy takes him to the hospital, but he can’t get any answers out of him, since he seems delirious, raving about a threat that affects him, Jimmy, and everyone like them. When Jimmy gets called away to a recording session with The Impressions (who provided the soundtrack to the movie, a solid example of cool 1970s soul), the guys who had been imprisoning him sneak into the hospital room, shoot him, and kidnap Wendy.

Wendy gets brought back to the mastermind behind the kidnapping-and-murder scheme, a creepy white guy named Monroe Feather (Jay Robinson) who raves about how he and his followers have finally found a solution to the impurities that are plaguing society. We soon learn that he’s the leader of a white supremacist group, and their scientists have come up with a poison that only kills Black people, so they’re planning to release it into the water supply in three major American cities as the big kickoff to a genocidal campaign.

That seems like it should be something terrifying, a threat that could conceivably wipe out millions, and one that’s based in an all-too-real hatred that Black people deal with every day. However, the movie treats it more like it’s the scheme of a James Bond villain, something that can be stopped by a few determined guys rather than serving as a real existential threat. Jimmy doesn’t even seem all that worried about what happened to Wendy; he says he wants to find her and stop the guys who killed his friend, but rather than, you know, following up on leads and trying to find the place where Black people were being experimented on, he flies to Chicago to recruit an old friend of his to help him.

That would be Jagger Daniels (Fred Williamson), who says he manages a PR firm but, like Jimmy, is really an action hero in the waiting. The two of them don’t have to wait long though, because they’re almost immediately attacked by thugs from the white supremacist group, who apparently have a whole army of people following these guys across the country and attacking them at every opportunity.

The third member of the team is Mister Keyes (Jim Kelly), and yes, Mister is his first name. He’s introduced in a scene where some cops plant drugs in his car, and then an officer stops him in the street and insists on seeing his license, all with the intent of spotting the drugs inside the car and arresting him. When Keyes realizes what’s going on, he uses his karate moves to beat up the cop, and also the other cops who had been waiting nearby. You would think there would be some consequences for doing so (I’ve played enough Grand Theft Auto to know that the cops don’t just give up when a few of them get taken out), but no, the team is off to do some investigations and fight the white supremacist threat, so they can just ignore any legal issues that might be affecting them.

After a shootout in a car wash, the team takes one of their assailants prisoner, and when they can’t get any information out of him, Jagger calls in a trio of biker women named Countess, Empress, and Princess to take over questioning. It’s uncertain what exactly they do to the guy, but it’s implied that they’re pretty excited to torture him to death (EDIT: I guess there was a scene involving nudity, but it was cut out of the version I watched). But before they do, he spills the whole scheme, giving them an understanding of the threat they’re facing.

Since the white supremacists are planning to release their poison in LA, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., the team splits up so each of them can protect one city. The expected action hijinks ensue, which is all generally pretty entertaining, before they finally can reunite to mount an assault on the bad guys’ headquarters. And well, that’s pretty much the whole movie, with our heroes not facing much in the way of difficulty as they take down a well-armed militia that has the resources to develop weapons of mass destruction but can’t be bothered to put guards around the outskirts of their compound.

This type of silliness is fine for an action movie that has little on its mind other than staging exciting battles and having heroes prevail over dastardly villains. It’s not too different from any number of action movies where the world-ending schemes of evil organizations are foiled at the last minute. But there’s something distasteful about the approach taken here, with a racially-targeted threat that could murder millions of Black Americans being treated like any other action movie plot.

Perhaps the thing that bothers me is that the movie treats racism like something that is confined to fringe weirdos who gather in secluded areas and get excited about some Nazi cosplay (their uniform consists of red berets and arm bands emblazoned with a double lightning bolt logo; the movie isn’t brave enough to have them use actual swastikas or Confederate flags). In real life, the racism is systemic, ingrained into nearly every aspect of American society, allowing for ongoing oppression while providing white people who want to forget the past with enough plausible deniability to claim that they earned everything they have through hard work, and Black people’s failure to put in the same amount of effort is the reason for their struggles.

The movie does have one aspect that rings somewhat true from the perspective of 2025, with the white supremacist group being led by a charisma-less buffoon who has somehow convinced his follow racists of his genius simply by insisting that they are superior to Black people. There’s no evidence to back that up though, since these guys are one of the most inept military forces ever captured on screen. They spend the entire movie spraying bullets at our heroes without doing any damage and then being easily blown away or beaten up. The idea that they could actually be a force to be reckoned with is kind of hilarious. But as we know, murderous racists tend not to be among the best and brightest members of society. Unfortunately, their real-life counterparts can do a lot more harm, as we’re currently seeing play out every day.

There’s a place for escapist fantasy, and perhaps it’s good to be able to spend some time in a world where racism can be defeated by pure-hearted heroes who are superior in every way to the knuckle-dragging dolts who believe the color of their skin makes them better than others. The movie certainly has fun depicting the action, whether it involves lots of car chases with exploding vehicles, hand-to-hand fights in which the bad guys are dumb enough to put down their weapons so they can take on a karate master, or one guy after another being blown away because they can’t figure out how to shoot straight.

It’s probably silly to ask for a movie to have any realism at all when that kind of nonsense is going on, but a sense of real-world stakes is what gives so many Blaxploitation movies their power. We don’t get that here at all, and even just a hint of relevance could have made this movie hit harder. Oh well, I’ll just have to settle for seeing lots of racists get killed, which isn’t a bad consolation prize.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner