For the love of God, Christina Ricci, put on some clothes. When a tractor dares to honk at our sassy heroine during the opening credits, the driver is met with a center-stage fuck-you: up goes her middle finger as “”Black Snake Moan”” descends from the sky, landing with a thud beneath Ricci’s dusty cowboy boots.
“”Black Snake Moan”” focuses on the lives of two very different characters — Rae and Lazarus — uniting in a small Tennessee town. Ricci plays Rae, a spitfire piece of white trash who fucks any man that moves, especially when she gets “”the itch,”” which reappears every time her boyfriend Ronnie (played by a weepy Justin Timberlake) leaves town for a month, a week or even a few minutes.
After Ronnie leaves for the military, Rae finds herself stuck in a town where everyone knows her name — and not in a good way — and even her own mother calls her a whore. What is there to do? Apparently, party and get laid. Unfortunately for Rae, this gets her a postcoital beatdown and a free trip down a highway ditch.
Enter God-fearing jazz musician Lazarus, played by a gray-haired, surly looking Samuel L. Jackson, with a familiar mouthful of motherfuckers — though this time, he’s got the snakes under control. Left by a two-timing wife who cheated on him with his brother, Laz passes out after a long night of drinking and awakens to a headache, the blues and Rae’s half-naked, battered body.
This is when the dark, twisted humor can truly begin — Rae manages to molest an adolescent boy and Jackson belts out some throaty blues every now and then. You would think that with a veteran cast and Craig Brewer’s touch, the man behind the ghetto grit of “”Hustle and Flow,”” we would get a steamy Southern drama brimming with focus and energy. But “”Black Snake,”” for all its tantalizing imagery and resonating hues, ends up a dated exploitation film: The chain Laz uses to tie Rae to the radiator (after he discovers her insatiable desire for dick) becomes a symbol of male dominance, Ricci crouching around the Jackson’s ankles like some sort of defeated kitten, taking her top off at least four times and remaining nearly naked for 40 minutes of the film. The predictable conclusion unfolds much too early as headstrong Rae realizes the error of her ways and finally deals with memories of childhood abuse. But is losing the shirt really necessary to advance the therapy? Goddammit, Christina, put those things away.
