Yet another example of a stage success being unsuccessfully translated to the screen, Whiteboyz takes a character from Danny Hoch's acclaimed one-man show Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop and stretches it into one strained comedy-drama. Jails deals heavily with race relations, but the film can be effectively summarized as White People Pretending They're Black: The Movie. A one-joke film in desperate denial and a terrible vehicle for Hoch, it revolves around three white Iowa high-schoolers (Hoch, Dash Mihok, and Mark Webber) obsessed with the glamour and violence of the gangsta lifestyle they hear about on countless rap albums. When not busting horrendous freestyles or shooting at cornstalks, the three plot to turn their gangsta dreams into reality, their scheme hinging on Hoch's vague plan to become a big-time kingpin by traveling to the Chicago ghetto and knocking on doors at random until he comes across a big-time drug supplier. It's a monumentally stupid strategy that succinctly illustrates why the film doesn't work: The super-mack fantasy offered by gangsta rappers like Master P is so over-the-top that you'd have to be mentally ill to take it seriously. It's likely that Hoch's gangsta wannabe worked a whole lot better on stage, but minus the intimacy and intensity of the theater, his character comes off as a pathetic clown, less a deluded kid than a brain-damaged, punch-drunk shadow boxer with a ridiculous identity crisis. Director Marc Levin comes from the world of documentaries, and one of Whiteboyz's many flaws is that it can't decide whether it wants to be a sort of Friday for the Limp Bizkit set or a serious social satire about the aimlessness and delusion of today's lost youth. Whiteboyz succeeds as neither, failing to amuse or enlighten. Hoch has accused Fox of burying Whiteboyz, but if he thinks the film is some sort of neglected masterpiece, he's as deluded as his clueless protagonist.