20 2000s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today
9. Black Snake Moan (2006)
What do you get when you combine one-fifth of NSYNC, Wednesday Addams, and a bad mother*cker? Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan is what. And if that sounds wild, just wait for the film’s plot...
Christina Ricci is Rae Doole, a young, drug-taking, Deep South nymphomaniac who can’t help but get herself in all kinds of trouble, and while her military man Ronnie Morgan (Justin Timberlake) is away on deployment, she winds up beaten, unconscious, and half-naked by the roadside. Taking this as the sign and opportunity to intervene, reclusive local farmer and bluesman Lazarus Redd (Samuel L. Jackson) takes her captive to try and get her on the straight and narrow.
Black Snake Moan is a brilliant and often overlooked movie, thanks to the bonkers premise and salacious, exploitation-adjacent promotional imagery of an old black man in a string vest with a white woman chained at his feet doing little to sell the film at the time of release. But while its subject matter was on the line at the time, it would be way over it today. The optics of a black Southern man chaining a nymphomaniac white girl to his radiator aren't great, whichever angle you view it from, and the presently strained global racial politics would make this flick a risk no studio with the resources to hire this calibre of stars would be willing to take.