It's a testament to the gravity and
authority the late Bernie Mac brought to his roles that he manages to hold onto
his battered dignity throughout an early scene in Soul Men, where he hits unexpected high notes as a
doctor shoves fingers up his rectum. It's a painful gag on multiple levels.
Sadly, that hackneyed bit is the rule rather than the exception in this dreadful
comedy. Soul Men
subjects Mac to an endless gauntlet of humiliation, sexual and otherwise, using
him as a sturdy vessel for stale gags involving Viagra, inopportune erections,
and groupies with false teeth and/or comically oversized breasts. The film is
so unrelentingly awful that its schmaltzy end-credits dedication to Mac and
co-star Isaac Hayes feels tacky and disrespectful.
In a nifty premise that promises far
more than it delivers, Soul Men casts Mac and Samuel L. Jackson as cranky old men who
achieved modest fame in their youths as part of a soul group whose lead singer
(John Legend, who lucks into a dialogue-free role) went on to huge solo fame
while his bandmates left music and pursued other interests: Mac became a
successful businessman, while Jackson fell into a life of petty crime. When
Legend dies, his ex-bandmates and longtime enemies reluctantly reunite for a
rowdy road trip to perform at a memorial.
Soul Men casts the best possible leads in the
worst possible movie. Director Malcolm D. Lee (Undercover Brother) and screenwriters Robert Ramsey
and Matthew Stone have made a completely joyless film about life-affirming
music by skimping on musical sequences and piling on crude sex jokes and stupid
stereotypes. Most egregious of these is an ugly, hateful, dim-witted gangsta
rapper who deals drugs, beats up his girlfriend, is musically and culturally
illiterate, and generally behaves like the kind of racist, one-dimensional
caricature that Lee's cousin Spike mercilessly lampooned in Bamboozled. Audiences throughout the world are
destined to give Mac and Hayes not just the obligatory moment of silence, but
103 whole minutes of silence; for all its crudeness and desperation, Soul
Men can't scare up
a single laugh.