Soul Plane gives new definitions to flying in style, too bad the film has none. Just imagine if Snoop Dogg was piloting your plane, a plane that comes equipped with thousand inch rims on the landing gear and a hydraulic system. Now imagine an hour and a half of mind-numbing comedy and you have Soul Plane.
Nashawn Wade (Kevin Hart) is a passenger who sues an airline after a humiliating experience and in turn is awarded a huge settlement, and decides to start his own airline. So with the controls of the airline industry in a new breed of hands Soul Plane is ready to crash land into theaters.
When you see a stand-up comedian, you know they are a hack when they come out and start doing jokes about airline travel. “I mean what is the deal with airplane food?” This is quickly followed by the newest sign of a hack comedian as the point out the differences between white people and black people, yeah haven’t heard that before. Soul Plane is a terrible combination of both.
On top of that, this movie has a ton of flaws, starting with a loosely constructed plot that skips around and struggles to get you set up for weak punch-lines. Another problem is that for a majority of the movie, the sight gags are the jokes, instead of having them in the background and the movie itself being funny.
That being said, hack stand-up comedians do get laughs, and sometimes they even kill. And to be fair, sometimes Soul Plane is funny, playing up on racial stereotypes, or the differences between races. It is not as subtle or insightful as the “Dave Chappelle Show”, but it is occasionally funny.
The other thing Soul Plane has going for it is a lot of cameos, including “stars” like Tom Arnold, Snoop Dogg, and Method Man who pretty much sleepwalk through their performances. Kevin Hart is the center of the film playing an annoying alter-ego of Chris Tucker on speed.
Soul Plane never makes it out of the realm of stereotypical jokes, nor does it break any new comedic ground in its mediocre attempts to point out the difference between black people and white people in a “what if” scenario that is never able to take off. It does offer a few laughs and has hip-hop star power, but this plane is not worth the price of the ticket.
