Cleopatra Jones (R)
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This came out in 1973 (two years before I was born, and one year before another female-centered blaxploitation film, Foxy Brown). I first saw it in 2017 (two years after I first saw "Foxy Brown"). I basically just mention that other movie because of the movie Austin Powers in Goldmember, which had a character named Foxxy Cleopatra, which is sort of an amalgam of the totally unrelated characters from these two movies. However, when I hear the name "Cleopatra Jones," I mainly think of the title drop in Digable Planets' song "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)." Oh, incidentally, I wanted to mention that when looking up links to put at the top of the review, I noticed IMDb says the movie is rated PG. I'm not sure where they get that from, because the DVD I'm watching says it's rated R.

Anyway... Cleopatra Jones is a secret agent for the U.S. government. (Wikipedia says she has a cover as a model, but she doesn't actually do any modeling in the movie, so I'm not sure where that comes from. Although she certain dresses like a model.) At the start of the movie, she's overseeing the firebombing of a poppy field in Turkey, which belongs to a drug lord back in the U.S., who goes by the name "Mommy" (Shelley Winters, seriously hamming it up in all her scenes). Which kind of reminds me of "Mom" from Futurama. Anyway, when Mommy hears about her poppy field, she's totally pissed, and comes up with a plan to force Cleo to return home, so Mommy's goons will have a chance to kill Cleo. Mommy gets the cops to bust a house for recovering drug addicts. This is something that never would have happened if Cleo's friend, a police captain named Crawford, had been around when the bust went down. But anyway, one of the cops plants a bag of heroin on one of the guys in the house, as a pretext to shut the place down.

Of course, just as Mommy hoped, Cleo returns to investigate. She reconnects with a guy named Reuben Masters, who runs the house, and who is apparently her boyfriend. She also gets some help in her investigation from a couple of martial artist brothers named Matthew and Melvin Johnson. Her investigation focuses at first on a guy named Doodlebug Simpkins, who works for Mommy. But Doodlebug thinks Mommy's plan to take on Cleo is a very bad idea, so he decides to quit and start running his territory for himself, instead of for Mommy. Which... I gotta say, is amazing in how it's simultaneously wise and utterly foolish. Anyway, another part of the investigation involves a crooked and racist cop named Purdy.

And I'm not sure what else to say. But there's lots of stuff going on throughout the movie, and it wasn't always clear to me how any one piece of the investigation led to the next. But it's not really important. What's important is that Cleo is awesome at everything. And while a lot of the movie is kind of redonkulous, it's also fairly amusing and certainly a lot of fun. I also think it's neat that, while every guy who doesn't want to kill Cleo totally "wants a piece of that," they also totally respect her.