Yes,
the following is an actual plot summary.
Nashawn Wade (Kevin Hart, Scary Movie 3)
is an African-American man who sues an airline after his ass gets stuck in
their airplane's toilet and his dog gets mulched in the engine on the wing of
the plane. He wins a $100 million settlement, which he promptly uses to start
his own pimped-out airline, which will cater to a predominantly
African-American clientele, called N.W.A. (Nashawn Wade Airlines, but the
Niggaz with Attitude reference will be understood by the target audience). The
plane is equipped with spinning rims, hydraulics, velvet interior, malt
liquor, club parties, strippers galore, and, of course, an extra-wide toilet
seat.
Irreverently politically incorrect, Soul Plane (a play off of the title
to the long-running TV show, “Soul Train”) deems no joke as too offensive. White people are ridiculed (they are from Cracker-land), Black people are
stereotyped (fried chicken, malt liquor, and basketball are hot pursuits), and
gay people are slurred continuously. The usual jokes are trotted out: Black
men are well-endowed, Black women like to get their freak on, white people are
afraid yet oddly still attracted to the Black experience, and gay men like to
wear lipstick and hit on every available man on board.
As
you can imagine, with such a huge ensemble cast and a short running time,
Soul Plane amounts to very little but bursts of skit comedy, sort of an
African-American version of Airplane!, except with jokes that aim as
low as possible. There are only two real rooting interests in the story, both
of them too feeble to serve as main plot elements. First, there are Nashawn’s
attempts to get back with his girl, Giselle (Aubert,
In the Mix), after a misunderstanding. The other is landing the plane
when both of the pilots are incapacitated (a fairly blatant event "borrowed"
from Airplane!). The rest of the film involves bathroom humor,
characters itching to get laid, and gags designed to "pimp-ify" the airline
experience.
I'll admit, some of the jokes are funny, a few I'm a bit ashamed to have
laughed at, but there just isn't enough real inspiration to take what should
have been a recurring skit comedy on TV and make it into a full-length feature
release. If you like your humor crude, lewd, and semi-nude, you might be able
to get a few frequent flyer miles from this lowbrow concoction. It plays to a
defined urban American audience, with references that only those that are
"down" will understand (i.e. none of Airplane’s "jive"
subtitles for people that don't know the lingo), with plenty of rap music
gags, drug references, and lots of trendy euphemisms for doing the nasty.
After experiencing the film, I'll have to give at least one politically
incorrect assessment, keeping in the spirit of things, as it were. There's a
gag where a large Middle Eastern man gets on board the plane, to the shock and
dismay of the rest of the passengers experiencing a knee-jerk anti-Arab 9/11
flashback. With jokes this crude and characters this obnoxious, if there were
one film where you wish a suicide terrorist would take hold of a plane, this
might be it.
If
this is still a trip you want to take, be sure to secure the location of that
air sickness bag directly in front of you, because with jokes this tasteless
and focus this scattershot, Soul Plane is one hell of a bumpy
flight.
