Heaving on a Jet Plane
If you find the Sept. 11 attack on America a barrel of laughs, you'll find Soul Plane hysterical. When director Jessy Terrero and the writers—too busy trying to establish street credentials to write decent jokes—present rapper Snoop Dogg's ex-con airline captain posing for a flight school photograph next to a few Jihadists, you half expect a box-cutter gag.
The real gag is this piece of vulgar black trash, which manages to insult (not spoof) virtually everyone. After a clever opening sequence, with an adorable baby ogling a mobile of airplanes and a hip, stylized Los Angeles International Airport, Soul Plane takes a nosedive.
When the lead character (Kevin Hart) takes a flight and gets his fanny stuck in a toilet, which ridiculously results in his dog being sucked into the engine, he sues, wins a multimillion dollar judgment and decides to establish his own airline. That's as logical as the movie, which is without a plot, gets.
Soul Plane lacks whatever one might expect from a silly, politically incorrect satire, like Airplane! or I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. Other than Dogg and Tom Arnold, the cast is relatively unknown, and the lousy script isn't their fault. The screenplay is stuck on situations with today's most prominent black targets for topical humor—Bobby and Whitney, The Reverend Al and Kobe—getting more mileage in a Letterman monologue. Janet Jackson's nipple doesn't even rate one line, though a lame joke about her brother is slipped in toward the end.
Among the worst moments: a horny blind man (John Witherspoon) mistakes female genitalia for a baked potato—Dogg's drug addict captain sends the plane into a dive (the co-pilot is busy soaking in an onboard hot tub)—and the requisite white bitch (Missi Pyle in the same role she played in Bringing Down the House) ditches Tom Arnold's character for a black stud who's hung like a horse.
That's about midway through the movie and neither she nor the dude (Dwayne Adway, who played Dennis Rodman in a TV movie) is heard from again. The passenger whom the blind guy mistakes for a potato also disappears, and that's just fine. They escape a racist script that treats blacks as a bunch of slobbering, horny hip-hoppers or the most docile creatures, happy as can be for some booty, a tune to dance to or a bucket of fried chicken. Don't be surprised if Soul Plane is used as a recruiting tool for white supremacists and Nation of Islam types.
The real gag is this piece of vulgar black trash, which manages to insult (not spoof) virtually everyone. After a clever opening sequence, with an adorable baby ogling a mobile of airplanes and a hip, stylized Los Angeles International Airport, Soul Plane takes a nosedive.
When the lead character (Kevin Hart) takes a flight and gets his fanny stuck in a toilet, which ridiculously results in his dog being sucked into the engine, he sues, wins a multimillion dollar judgment and decides to establish his own airline. That's as logical as the movie, which is without a plot, gets.
Soul Plane lacks whatever one might expect from a silly, politically incorrect satire, like Airplane! or I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. Other than Dogg and Tom Arnold, the cast is relatively unknown, and the lousy script isn't their fault. The screenplay is stuck on situations with today's most prominent black targets for topical humor—Bobby and Whitney, The Reverend Al and Kobe—getting more mileage in a Letterman monologue. Janet Jackson's nipple doesn't even rate one line, though a lame joke about her brother is slipped in toward the end.
Among the worst moments: a horny blind man (John Witherspoon) mistakes female genitalia for a baked potato—Dogg's drug addict captain sends the plane into a dive (the co-pilot is busy soaking in an onboard hot tub)—and the requisite white bitch (Missi Pyle in the same role she played in Bringing Down the House) ditches Tom Arnold's character for a black stud who's hung like a horse.
That's about midway through the movie and neither she nor the dude (Dwayne Adway, who played Dennis Rodman in a TV movie) is heard from again. The passenger whom the blind guy mistakes for a potato also disappears, and that's just fine. They escape a racist script that treats blacks as a bunch of slobbering, horny hip-hoppers or the most docile creatures, happy as can be for some booty, a tune to dance to or a bucket of fried chicken. Don't be surprised if Soul Plane is used as a recruiting tool for white supremacists and Nation of Islam types.
