Soul Plane
dir. Jessy Terrero
MGM

There is a syndrome from childhood whom we might call Dirty Johnnie, after the genre of jokes he inspires. He lives to make us aware of the more disgusting aspects of sex, excretion, race relations and even language itself. Shakespeare called him Caliban and made him speak his heart to Prospero, "You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse." The more subversive, high-functional sufferers of this syndrome can be quite funny, at least in the context of repressed and bowdlerized bourgeois institutions, like junior high. The less gifted Johnnie hypercompensates for lack of wit with extra filthiness. The imaginations behind Soul Plane seem to lie at that end of the spectrum.

The trailer for Soul Plane seemed to promise a sort of Airplane! as conceived by the Wayanses instead of the Zuckers, but the promise is unfortunately not fulfilled. It starts out interestingly — Nashawn Wade (Kevin Hart) goes to board an airliner with his small dog and he gets the runaround from the uptight white crew. We know right off that while we won't be getting rocket science from the writers (Bo Zenga and Chuck Wilson), we might get some lively send-ups of bureaucratic crackers, and the clash of cultures might provide some broad laughs — maybe even something as surprising as June Cleaver speaking jive. Nashawn's trip turns hellish so fast you almost don't have time to think between gags. By the time he's hauled screaming off the plane with grounds for a major lawsuit, the film seems to have hit its stride.

Alas, we get to see too much of the lawsuit, including a white devil lawyer and Nashawn winning over the jury with wise words from his mother, none of which is remotely believable, funny or stylishly rendered. It's director Jessy Terrero's first feature and he seems to have told everyone to overplay all the time, even when they're setting up the slightest gag. No matter that it's not funny apparently, this scene explains how Nashawn Wade comes into enough money to found NWA Airlines (Get it? Like the rappers?) and put some "fly" into the air-bus business.

Naturally, we get a purple jumbo jet with 84-inch spinner rims. It's based at Terminal X (Get it? Like the rapper?), which features a Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles (white Hollywood's favorite soul food place), a basketball court and lots of bootylicious flight attendants. When Elvis Hunkee (Tom Arnold) and his white-bread family come strolling in, bumped onto NWA's maiden flight, the pace picks up again slightly. The blonde stepmonster-to-be is clearly freaked out by all the negroes, but Elvis and his kids find it pretty cool, despite having just come from a vacation in "Crackerland." Then Snoop Dogg shows up, as the well-chronicked Captain Mack, the plane loads up and complications ensue.

Thereafter, some funny bits are interspersed, but they come farther and farther apart as the voyage draws on. To squeeze a laugh out you must put aside any reservations about stereotyping. Black people in this movie are shiftless but fun-loving, warm-hearted but cultureless, spontaneous but lacking impulse control and, above all, oversexed. The white folks are paranoid, uptight and secretly envious of the sexual power of the more soulful. Homosexuals are icky and predatory but always useful as the butt of a joke, which is why the token flamer is named "Flame." NWA's first flight provides far too many returns to the plane's lavatory, where the pacing slows excruciatingly, so we can really enjoy the gastric distress and other gross-out touches. Along the way there are also inexplicable attempts to sober up, to actually have characters acquire character, wisdom and love. These are boring and implausible but perhaps cheaper than paying writers for more jokes. This allows Tom Arnold to steal the show — which about says it all.

There is an odd formlessness to the whole film. A lot of black celebrities (Karl Malone, D.L. Hughley, Mo'Nique Imes-Jackson) seem to have been cast just to broaden appeal in the "urban" market, and it seems as if they might have been allowed to improv their own bits, in the manner of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries. This creates a series of erratic skits rather than a coherent comedy. Some characters and subplots seem to come out of nowhere, or to disappear there inexplicably. Comedic set-up/pay-off is all but discarded for sight gags and rimshot one-liners.

Somehow, in the course of the flight, little Billy Hunkee becomes an assistant director on the hip-hop video being shot in the first-class disco. We learn in an epilogue that he goes on to make this his successful career. His brilliance apparently consists in wanting "more ass" in every scene, and so Dirty Johnnie finds his niche. I have to wonder, in retrospect, if the auteur is slyly putting a miniature version of himself in the picture, like Hitchcock in Psycho.

By way of contrast, consider, from the summer of 2002, Undercover Brother. In that movie, the authors came up with a fabulous premise for interracial comedy: The Man, an evil genius on an island fortress, has discovered a drug that turns black people into stereotypes. The eponymous "brother" must foil this nefarious plot, a premise that allowed all involved to wade right into the most pernicious of racist clichés and turn them hilariously inside out. Soul Plane takes a venerable comedic concept, overloads it with those same half-digested clichés and runs the whole mess into the ground.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)