Three the Hard Way

1974 Directed by Gordon Parks Jr.

The story involves a white supremist plot to taint the United States water supply with a toxin that is harmless to whites but lethal to blacks. The only obstacles that stand in the way of this dastardly plan are Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly, who shoot, kick and karate chop their way to final victory.

Jim Brown Fred Williamson Jim Kelly Sheila Frazier Jay Robinson Marian Collier Alex Rocco Corbin Bernsen Irene Tsu Jeannie Bell

89 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Todd Gaines ★★★ 4

Classic blaxploitation starring three of its biggest stars who do it their own fuckin' way. Grand Theft Auto. Oxygen tank. Badass singing. The smooth voice of E. Rodney Jones. Hospital horror. Car park drama. High speed chase. Photo booth ownage. Arcade action. The White Devil. Set-up. Jim Kelly's fuckin' badass fro. Going all Enter the Dragon on some motherfuckers. The car wash. Crotch rockets. The first time Fred Williamson smokes a cigar. Topless interrogation. Jim Brown's grit. A payphone. Dump truck mayhem. Exploding billboard. Red hat dumb fucks. Free fallin'. Party crashers. Electric fence. Taking out the fuckin' trash. DYNO-mite motherfucker! The film works best when all three stars are together kicking ass and taking names. Jim Kelly does some…
Review by Remobo ★★★★ 3

Jim Brown is a music producer that tells a doctor his bullet wound is a “household incident”.
Fred Williamson calls in a trio of red, white, and blue leather-clad, motorcycle riding, dominatrices to toplessly torture a white supremacist until he dies from FEAR!
And Jim Kelly’s introduction is just him kicking the crap out of some corrupt cops, and then, just, going about his day.
Watch this movie. It’s right here. See if you can find a single second of this hour and a half long movie that isn’t pure, Blaxploitation greatness boiled down to its purest form starring the closest thing to a cinematic supergroup since “Seven Samurai”; I couldn’t. This film drops you right in the middle of the…
Review by The Ramblin Gamblin Cliff Booth ★★★★

Can you get more badass than this .
Jim Brown ,Fred Williamson and Jim Kelley are a pair that will fuck a lot of people up haha .
I can see the clear black dynamite references coming from this and I can’t wait for “One Down ,Two to Go”
Review by Liam Ball ★★★½

The 007 series has a way of responding to its contemporaries. Live and Let Die (1973) is, for all intents and purposes, a blaxploitation film; it's got a funky-as-fuck score and a predominately black cast (including blax great Yaphet Kotto), only it's spearheaded by a white guy. Funnily enough, blaxploitation also had a way of responding to its contemporaries, and for all intents and purposes, Three the Hard Way (1974) is a Bond film, and in particular, a response to Live and Let Die. With a predominately white cast spearheaded by three black leads, Three flips Roger Moore's most respected effort on its head; its city-hopping protagonists are all crackshots or martial arts masters (that's Jim Kelly, essentially reprising his…
Review by Steve G 🐝 ★★★★

As I slowly work my way through more and more blaxploitation films, I find myself looking at them, and the origins of what we largely recognise to be the classic action film, in a different way.
Being a giddy acolyte of 70s crime cinema as I am, I tend to focus my attention on what I believe made it the very best decade for the genre and what probably attracts me to it. The gritty, downbeat, post-classic noir attitude of it all - and not just in America either. It's there to see in the UK, France, Italy, Japan and other notable countries for the genre.
But blaxploitation wasn't just a sub-genre. It wasn't just 'black crime' or black exploitation…
Review by Jack ★★★

You see the idea of White supremacists poisoning water supplies causing black people to become mutated doesn't seem far fetched. It's the reality.
This has everything the genre offers. Beautiful women, karate, shootouts, an R&B score, and extravagant car chases. Jim Brown is suave as a motherfucker. I think we can leave it at that.
Review by Kevin Casciani Nolan ★★★

Blaxplotation:
Movie #19:
Three The Hard Way
_________________________
Another Insanely Entertaining If Flawed Movie Of This Marathon That Once Again Drew Me In With It Outstanding Cast And Crazy Sounding Plot, So Intriguing, So Messy, Everything You Would Expect From Reading The Plot Happens, This Predictability However Does Not Hold The Movie Back At Least For Me It Didn't, I Enjoyed It Despite Knowing Where It Was Going To Go, Just Reading That Last Line In The Plot About Our 3 Leads Who Shoot, Kick And Karate Chop Their Way To Victory Was Enough To Get Me To Watch, The Action Set-Pieces Are Without Doubt The Best Part Of The Movie, The Dialogue Is Far Inferior Which Is Never A Good Sign But It Knows It's Faults And Embraces Them Which Make It An Easy Enough Watch.
Next Review: The King Of Comedy (1982)
Review by More_Badass ★★★★

Jim Brown in Slaughter mode, Jim Kelly fresh off Enter The Dragon, Fred Williamson in his Black Caesar prime. Blaxploitation cool meets low-fi Bond action, shotguns and roundhouse kicks instead of gadgets.
Three The Hard Way rarely goes a few minutes before another chase or shootout, only stopping for topless torture experts and the genocidal gloating of neo-nazi mad scientists. Compared to Shaft or Truck, the film is more muted in style, more conventional, but compensates with a threefold action explosion across Detroit, DC, and LA: fairway shootout, car wash ambush, parking garage pursuit, the finale’s armed-to-the-teeth guns-blazing compound assault. Come for the supercool charisma of its leads, stay for the top-tier stunts and bloody spectacle.
Nazi scientist manic: “No power on earth can stop us now”
Cut to Brown, Kelly, & Williamson with a small army’s worth of weaponry
It’s that kind of movie
Review by Russ Davies ★★★

A neo-Nazi group devises a way to kill all black people by poisoning the public water supplies in LA, Detroit and Washington DC with a nefarious scientific concoction - one that spares the white folk - and it's up to buddies Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly to take down the army of mustache-twirling bad guys on their own and save the United States.
Yes, the picture is as provocatively non-serious as it sounds - but that’s the fun: you really want this troika of 70s urban superstars to give it to these dumbass white supremacists, and how.
SUPERFLY director Gordon Parks, Jr.’s setup allows for so much good action every few minutes - choreographed by the legendary Hal…
Review by Rich Strahs ★★★½

This is the first time I have seen this and instantly I thought of Black Dynamite. At least the basic plot line, Black Dynamite completely ripped this off. The opening scene’s music had me expecting to hear three Jewish rappers from Brooklyn to break into a song that shares the same name as this movie. That has to be a coincidence right?!?
https://youtu.be/vQE0YzysnHE
Review by Keith Adams Jr. ★★★½

Quickie Review
The follow-up to his trailblazing blaxploitation classic Super Fly, Gordon Parks Jr. continues in the realm of blaxploitation with this cult classic that brings together of the genre’s greatest badasses: Jim Brown, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson & Jim “The Dragon” Kelly! After an old friend is killed in the hospital following an escape from a prison camp and his girlfriend Wendy (Shiela Frazier) is kidnapped by the killers after discovering their presence, Jimmy (Brown) travels from Los Angeles to Chicago to recruit his old friends Jagger Daniels (Williamson) & Mister Keyes (Kelly) to avenge the death, rescue Wendy and foil the nefarious secret plot of black genocide concocted by Monroe Feather (Jay Robinson), the leader of a secret white supremacist…
Review by Davis. ★★★★½

now that's what i'm talkin about!!! this is one gleefully violent blaxploitation flick, teaming up a trio of the subgenre's top action stars (Brown/Williamson/Kelly) for wall-to-wall honky ass kicking. even moreso than SHAFT IN AFRICA, it's the closest blax i've seen to a Bond film, climaxing in a Nazi compound raid that Fred Williamson spends double-fisting machine guns while chomping on a cigar as Jim Kelly runs around shirtless doing slow motion karate. then once the boys have finished off the main villains, they decide to go back for MORE OWNAGE, whippen a van around and slinging sticks of dynamite out the side of the goddamn door just for the hell of it. would kill for an EXPENDABLES style sequel…

Recent reviews

Review by DrJohnCollins ★★★★★

What do you get when you combine kickass biker chicks, Kung fu, totally bonkers stunts, the funkiest Soundtrack this side of the 70s, a horde of Nazis, and three jive dudes on a mission? You get the direct, and somehow even more ridiculous, inspiration for Black Dynamite. 10/10.
Review by Russ Davies ★★★

A neo-Nazi group devises a way to kill all black people by poisoning the public water supplies in LA, Detroit and Washington DC with a nefarious scientific concoction - one that spares the white folk - and it's up to buddies Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly to take down the army of mustache-twirling bad guys on their own and save the United States.
Yes, the picture is as provocatively non-serious as it sounds - but that’s the fun: you really want this troika of 70s urban superstars to give it to these dumbass white supremacists, and how.
SUPERFLY director Gordon Parks, Jr.’s setup allows for so much good action every few minutes - choreographed by the legendary Hal…
Review by John Shelton ★★★★

One of the great 70s action movies.
Review by The Ramblin Gamblin Cliff Booth ★★★★

Can you get more badass than this .
Jim Brown ,Fred Williamson and Jim Kelley are a pair that will fuck a lot of people up haha .
I can see the clear black dynamite references coming from this and I can’t wait for “One Down ,Two to Go”
Review by Filmingeneral ★★★★

A triumph of Blaxploitation cinema, Three The Hard Way is everything I could ever want in the genre. It features stellar action sequences, all the one liners of a Schwarzenegger vehicle, a banging theme song. This is an all star dream team of Blaxploitation and it is a film that needs to be seen to be believed. If you can find the Blaxploitation set in Dollar General, buy it, because it will be the best $6 you ever spent.
Review by BlaculaNCrakul ★★★ 5

> White cops want to help exterminate everyone not white
> Also white cops, attack black ninja in close combat with ranged weapons
Review by Adam Lounsbery ★★★

Well, this was a wild ride. I put it on thinking it was a western (I had it mixed up in my head with Take a Hard Ride, which has the same three stars), and was surprised when I saw modern firearms and 1970s automobiles.
From the first moment, just about everything in the film was a surprise, since I had absolutely no clue what this was about. However, one big clue dropped in the credits, and that was the name of stunt coordinator Hal Needham. If you've watched any Burt Reynolds car-chase movies, you know the work of Hal Needham.
Needham's work is what most people think of when they think "'70s car chase movies." Big, heavy, four-door sedans…
Review by Jack ★★★

You see the idea of White supremacists poisoning water supplies causing black people to become mutated doesn't seem far fetched. It's the reality.
This has everything the genre offers. Beautiful women, karate, shootouts, an R&B score, and extravagant car chases. Jim Brown is suave as a motherfucker. I think we can leave it at that.
Review by David Balderdash

Jim Brown Super Sunday Double Feature
Review by DongCornelius ★★★★½

White supremacists get Slaughtered, Hammered and Black Belt Jonesed and it's glorious.
Review by Evan Vellela ★★★½

Further proof to my theory that white supremacists are total fucking wimps.
Review by doctorinsermini ★½

Siento bochorno viendo este Blaxploit-trash. Más o menos el mismo que transmite su responsable, Gordon Parks Jr. por estar filmando semejante tontuna. Por cierto, el karate es siempre ridículo.