Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy flight. Intended to be a black version of hit comedy Airplane!, Soul Plane, like the titular jumbo jet on which of the action takes place, is instead on autopilot for most of its 86 minutes.
After Nashawn (Hart) gets his butt stuck in an airplane toilet and his dog is killed, he wins $100 million in a settlement and decides to start America's first all-black airline. It's a brilliant plan, really, even after Elvis Hunkee (Tom Arnold) and his family accidentally get rerouted onto the maiden flight. The Malcolm X terminal has a basketball court, the jet has its own club serving Hpnotiq, and the cockpit has DVD players installed in the seat headrests.
The problems start when Nashawn's cousin Muggsy (Method Man) hires Capt. Mack (Snoop Dogg) to fly the plane, a pot-smoking reprobate whose only experience was on flight-simulators in Pelican Bay State Prison.
Of course, it's all a set-up for a long series of jokes and gags playing off every African-American stereotype you can think of, as well as bits about rap videos, massive drug use, and yes, tea-bagging. Unfortunately, first-time feature director Jessy Terrero can't keep the movie at a steady cruising altitude. The plot, such as it is, involves Elvis trying to deal with his daughter's impending 18th birthday and its sexual freedom. Yes, a movie directed by, starring and about black people devotes a good chunk of its meager running time to a problem faced by a white father and his daughter.
As soon as that issue is solved—solves itself really—it seems that Capt. Mack has self-medicated himself into the grave and it's up to the untrained Nashawn to land the plane while mending some romantic bridges with old flame Giselle (K.D. Aubert).
In between are bits about an overly ambitious couple joining the mile-high club, an oversexed blind man fingering a baked potato and an overly endowed black man making off with a white woman.
While comic geniuses Jim Abrahams and David Zucker were able to merge story and slapstick in Airplane!, Terrero lacks their deft touch. As tissue-thin as Soul Plane's plotlines are, they still manage to get in the way of the raunchy fun, sending the whole frothy mix plummeting downward time and again.