
‘Soul Plane’ laughs rely on dirty jokes, stereotypes
By CRAIG OUTHIER
Get Out
At the risk of betraying my own social biases, let me state for the record that Barbara Billingsley talking jive is many shades mo’ funny than Snoop Dogg busting rhyme at the controls of a pimped-out 747.
Likewise, much of “Soul Plane” suffers in comparison to “Airplane!” — the seminal 1980 disaster spoof that inspired it. Which isn't to say that rookie director Jessy Terrero has failed in his mission to lampoon black pop culture with every hoary stereotype at his disposal. Mission spectacularly (and, perhaps, offensively) accomplished. The jokes are there — “Soul Plane” simply lacks the wit and free-fall zany abandon of its older, less jiggy cousin.
If indeed it is stereotypes you crave, writers Bo Zenga and Chuck Wilson have packed them into this ribald parody like, er, Cambodian refugees into a one-bedroom apartment. It all circulates around N.W.A., the world's first all-black airline, where the in-flight meal consists of Church's Fried Chicken and Colt 45s. Back at the terminal, passengers can shop at a variety of 99-cent stores and athletic footwear outlets. The plane's landing gear has revolving ghetto rims and the corporate motto is “We fly, we party, we land.”
Due to a booking snafu, N.W.A. gets its first white passengers: The Hunkee family, led by an uptight divorced dad (Tom Arnold) who is horrified by the fact that both his barely legal daughter (Arielle Kebbel) and ditzy girlfriend (Missi Pyle) sexually gravitate toward their strapping male co-passengers. I don't know who should be more offended: Black men (for having their vanities so crudely pandered to) or white women (for being reduced to sexual novelties). Or white men, for that matter, for getting cruelly bumped out of the equation.
Amid all the bathroom jokes and copulation gags and one enormously wrong (yet funny, admittedly) sequence involving a baked potato are a few cursory stabs at social commentary. For example, the filmmakers portray the plane as a socio-economic microcosm of black America: A sparsely populated “first class,” complete with every ostentatious luxury money can buy, and a largely ignored, marginalized “lower class,” where even the seat upholstery doesn't match.
Curiously, the most offensive scenes in “Soul Plane” are not the ones involving simulated sex and baked potatoes, but those in which the filmmakers try to be earnest. When actor Kevin Hart (“Scary Movie 3”), playing the clownish CEO of the airline, delivers a sob story to the jury which will ultimately hand him the gaudy cash award he'll use as seed money, Terrero plays the scene straight, as if getting rich through litigation really were the American dream.
That's just cynical, my nizzle.
|