Today’s quick review: Soul Plane. After a disastrous flight, Nashawn Wade (Kevin Hart) wins $100 million from the airline in a lawsuit. With the help of his cousin Muggsy (Method Man), he uses the money to start his own airline, a hip luxury service with all the amenities its passengers could possibly want. Nashawn hops aboard his airline’s wild first flight, headed by the laid-back and dubiously qualified pilot Captain Mack (Snoop Dogg).
Soul Plane is a raucous comedy that satirizes the flight industry by pairing it with a caricature of black culture. From the airline’s curvacious stewardesses to the plane’s spinners and hydraulics, Soul Plane is an extended thought experiment that explores the wildly infeasible way an airline could be run, given enough money and laxity towards federal aviation regulations.
Soul Plane focuses on comedy to the exclusion of all else: the film has incredibly little in the way of character development or plot. Instead, Soul Plane delivers a rapid-fire string of cheap jokes with only a few loose plot threads to hold them together. The humor is crass but earns an occasional chuckle, while the outrageous tone of the movie ensures that the viewer’s expectations are never set too high.
At its best, Soul Plane tells simple jokes in suitably over-the-top fashion. No one joke is all that clever, but the movie goes to extremes to make sure every gag comes across clearly and energetically. At its worst, Soul Plane is a mishmash of offputting humor with no real purpose or direction. Anyone who isn’t sold on the premise in the first five minutes won’t be sold at all.
Watch Soul Plane when you are in the mood for a ridiculous romp that does not take itself too seriously. The lowbrow humor and lack of redeeming features will be enough to turn most viewers off the experience, but those who are willing to check their standards at the door can have a good time with the film.
4.4 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 4.0 for storytelling quality and a 6.0 for dumb, entertaining humor.