I'm as down as the next G with homies gettin' their own Something About Mary gross-out thing goin' on. And Soul Plane is nothing if not game (in the rotting-meat sense) in its attempt to take on all comers, or maybe come on all takers. But the film's aim, even at a paltry 86 minutes, is so wide of any recognizable mark that it's hard to say what anyone was even pointing at.

The movie's ads, which centre on a Prince-purple plane with gold mag wheels and humpty-hump hydraulics, make you think that this will be the bruthas' own version of Airplane!, but that pop classic's few scenes with June Cleaver translating jive talk said more about the racially bifurcated state of American culture circa 1980 than Soul Plane does today. Bluntly put, this is a pitiless--if sometimes hilarious--parade of ethnic and gender stereotypes, with no real intelligence at the controls. I mean, when a film patently aimed at the Saturday-night inner-city box office gives Tom Arnold top billing and the juiciest role, you have to wonder who's in charge.

The ex-- Mr. Roseanne plays Elvis Hunkee, plaid-shirted patriarch of the only white people to fly on the maiden voyage of NWA airline. The new company is named for Nashawn Wade (comic Kevin Hart), who won a hundred million bucks in a lawsuit against a company with which he had several freak run-ins; let's just say they involved a hungry toilet seat and canine hamburger and leave it at that.

Now Nashawn is out to prove himself in the fly game, and his attention to kitsch detail has been impressive. But why he would delegate the hiring of his first pilot to rough cousin Muggsy (rapper Method Man), however, is hard to grasp, except for anyone looking to give Snoop Dogg another easygoing role. Other featured performers include Mo'nique Imes-Jackson as an overly frisk-happy security agent, John Witherspoon as a blind man who gropes everything out of sight, and D. L. Hughley as a cigar-chomping bathroom attendant who helpfully provides a Caucasian Adaptor to narrow-assed Hunkees who wander in. That is by far the mildest dose of scatology on offer here.

First-time director Jessy Terrero, a former casting director and music-vid maven, is obviously good at creating a climate in which the actors can bounce off each other hard enough to make sparks fly. But he has no clue how to find any narrative shape in the script from Bo Zenga and Chuck Wilson. The plain-looking flick's art direction has some funny touches--first class is all white pleather while "low class" has bus-station lockers and boxes of fried chicken being passed around--but between the tedious gay-bashing and all the Stepin Fetchit setups, you have to wonder if Soul Plane isn't really designed to land at drive-ins deep in the heart of Dixie.