During an all-media press screening at Manhattan's Loews 84th Street multiplex, a rowdy fistfight broke out between two decidedly non-professionals at exactly the moment of Idlewild's climactic shoot-out. This critic had to piece together who shot whom from the ending sequences, the distraction of the real-life brawl given a heightened urgency amidst the sound of movie gunfire. Still, if I had only one person to blame for ruining my cinematic experience, it would have to be writer-director Bryan Barber.
Harlem Nights! The Cotton Club! Under the Cherry Moon! There are plenty of ambitious failures that could be dug up for comparison to Barber's jittery mess of a debut, a self-indulgent vehicle for hip-hop duo Outkast that takes place in the Depression-era South. Like their separate-but-together album dynamic, stars Antwan "Big Boi" Patton (as the cheating family man and crooner, Rooster) and André "3000" Benjamin (the introverted mortician's son and piano player, Percival) are almost entirely isolated from one another's fragmented storylines, except when both are tethered to a centerpiece speakeasy called Church. Rooster's path is a typical gin-joint tale about trying to get out from under the thumb of hooch-peddling gangster Trumpy (Terrence Howard, so cruelly over-the-top that he seems like he's in a different movie altogether). Percy's trip is a typical eccentric's tale about trying to get out from under the thumb of an oppressive father (Ben Vereen, slummin' it), and both leads have arbitrary love interests that prove even forward-thinking innovators like Outkast can make a sappy, sexless, predictable melodrama.
But this is a musical, isn't it? Almost. Barber—who got his start as the director of Outkast videos and never looked back from a life in MTV—doesn't have the chops to pull off anything but a two-hour music video. There are silly, pop-snazzy montages and CGI gratuity that offer instant gratification instead of cleverness, such as the cloying, animated rooster on his namesake's lucky flask who riffs like a member of P-Funk in a Chuck Jones cartoon. Between that, the sped-up and slo-mo footage for childish naught, and the thoughtless anachronisms (Rooster calls himself a "bow-tie pimp"), it's obvious that Barber has no particular interest in or reverence for the era, and his gimmickry is hardly fresh enough to detract from everything else that's pedestrian. Even the genre-bouncing Idlewild album itself (don't call it a soundtrack!) has only a few inspired tracks compared to any of Outkast's past work (ripping off Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" wholesale is hardly imaginative), and its lyrics simply don't push the plot forward, thereby stopping the momentum dead whenever anyone starts singing or dancing. A thin sprinkling of exuberance and a couple of choice cameos, that's about all this underwritten and overly choreographed spectacle has to tease us with.
