Idlewild stars Andre Benjamin and Antwan A. Patton from the hip-hop group OutKast as childhood friends in this 2006 musical. The film was written and directed by Bryan Barber, who has directed several OutKast music videos. Idlewild is Barber’s feature film debut. The music from the film was provided by OutKast, with a matching soundtrack album from the group, and by John Debney, who provided the film’s musical score. Idlewild features lively song-and-dance numbers, gangster action, and plenty of dazzling costumes to look at, but it fails in bringing together an elegant or interesting story.
Andre Benjamin plays Percival, a man who works with his father (Ben Vereen) at the morgue during the day and works at a nightclub playing piano at night. He is good friends with Rooster, played by Antwan A. Patton, who is involved in gambling and a generally dangerous lifestyle. When the owner of the nightclub (Ace Love) is gunned down by a deadly and vengeful gangster (Terrence Howard), Rooster must take over the club and pay off the old owner’s debts. Meanwhile, Percival falls in love with a young nightclub singer (Paula Patton) who may not be who she seems. All of this occurs guided by OutKast music and plenty of style shots.
The music in Idlewild is often applauded as being quite good, but I found it rather distracting and rather noisy. Often overproduced and containing far too many “sounds” for my liking, the soundtrack of the film rarely fits the scenes in which is exists and, instead, distracts constantly from the “story.” Instead of Idlewild being a musical that guides the story and introduces us to characters and ideas, the music in Idlewild serves to crowd the story out and simply advertise OutKast as a musical group. There’s really no reason for this film to exist that I can see, so it might as well advertise the matching soundtrack album. It’s always going to look that way to me, too, especially given a cast that includes Patti LaBelle and Ben Vereen in decidedly non-musical roles.
The performances were just okay, in my view. Andre Benjamin has proven to be quite decent in the past, as I’ve enjoyed him on screen before. But in this film, he plays a character that is too subdued to be interesting and too soft to be compelling. I found Percival to be almost maddening quiet and his musical extension, when he finally plays a song he wrote, to be so unfitting to his character that it came out of Andre 300 out OutKast and not of the character he was playing in the film. This mismatch wasn’t as present with Antwan A. Patton’s character, Rooster, thankfully. Unfortunately for Big Boi, though, his Rooster lacked a lot of substance too. Erupting into raps while being chased by gangsters, his speed-rapping laid-back style barely matched any scene he performed in and, instead, brought the whole thing to a kind of sluggish crawl.
The cinematography is as noisy as the soundtrack, sadly. With gobs of style shots, quick cuts, overheads, and other camera parlour tricks, the cinematography and direction in Idlewild is a dizzying pastiche of everything wrong with music videos. I don’t think there was a straight shot in the film, quite frankly, and many times the shot selection got silly. It’s like watching a basketball team take three-pointers from nowhere for an entire game. Barber’s direction of some of the better-looking dance sequences in the nightclub was trashed by this looming beast of a cinematography problem that ate everything it touched much in the same way the overproduced soundtrack took up valuable space.
The look of the film is quite good, if one can ignore the style-shot obsession. The costumes and art direction are stunning, as is the look of the characters themselves. Idlewild rips many good ideas right out of the era in which the film takes place and transplants them in this hip-hop musical without losing any style points in wardrobe. The feel of the film, sadly, never matches the look. The characters look great, but they never are great. Ideas for the characters seemed tacked on after the fact and the whole form of the musical seems like an afterthought to the “let’s make a movie” thought that likely came first before any good sense.
The sad thing is that Idlewild did have the ingredients to be a rather satisfying picture. It looks good, at times, when it’s not being fussed with and the performances are passable. It’s nice to see Patti LaBelle on the screen and one wishes she would have been given the chance to sing rather than another bland rap performance from Big Boi. Overall, Idlewild is a failure of a film that is as noisy and crowded as its overproduced soundtrack.
2/10
Trailer:
