D-

Hand out the barf bags. “Soul Plane,” which deals with the maiden flight of NWA, the nation’s first black-owned airline, isn’t so much a narrative as a series of sketches pegged on the initial premise. In itself that isn’t a recipe for disaster–after all, it’s the same formula that “Airplane!” used to fine effect back in 1980. But in this case the level of tastelessness and vulgarity should cause cultural security checkpoints to go off.

It’s serendipitous that the picture is being released at the moment Bill Cosby has chosen to ignite a debate on what he sees as the failures of some aspects of African-American society in contemporary America, because “Soul Plane” could serve as exhibit A in favor of his argument. The ploy, if one can call it that, is set in motion when a jobless black dude named Nashawn (Kevin Hart) acts like a jerk on a plane–naturally we’re supposed to sympathize with him because he comes from a poor background and is struggling to succeed, because he’s been disrespected, and because he’s the jive-talking narrator who puts his spin on everything–and wins a huge settlement from the airline, with which he founds NWA. The rest of the movie plays on the funkiness of the operation and the multiple crises and minor catastrophes that plague the first flight. Naturally a great many stock characters are involved, all of them played with bone-crushing exuberance by a cast that seems under the impression they have to reach the last row of the second balcony.

It would be futile, as well as boring, to try to disentangle all the threads that link up through the ninety or so minutes the picture runs; save that they run the gamut from a pilot (Snoop Dogg) who’s an ex-con afraid of heights to two “Big Momma”-type security checkers more interested in doing cavity checks on “players” than watching for weapons. There’s also–ha, ha!–a blind guy who touches stewardesses in the most inappropriate places. Suffice it to say that the real subject of the movie is sex. There are more jiggly shots and suggestive dialogue than would be needed for a dozen other flicks, and people are doing it all over the place. Unfortunately, that’s not unusual in pictures targeted to the black audience. Is it really amusing for African-Americans to be portrayed as insatiable sex machines with absolutely uncontrollable libidos? Isn’t that the grossest form of stereotyping, essentially a new version of Stepin Fetchit? Why, then, are so many black viewers perfectly willing to guffaw at these caricatures, which they might well consider insulting instead? And as if that weren’t bad enough, the other big emphases are potty humor (a toilet scene even cruder than the one in “Dumb & Dumber”) and drug gags. As to make matters still worse, there’s a whole string of gay jokes in the picture (a co-pilot named Gaeman, a male attendant named Flame) that has a really mean-spirited subtext. And, of course, whites must be portrayed as morons. The only Caucasian family aboard are the Hunkees (hah, hah!), who are, of course, the butt of many jokes. Dad is a sweet-hearted, uncomprehending doofus–what else would you expect of somebody played by Tom Arnold?–and his snooty girlfriend a gold-digger who lusts after the first big black man she sees; his kids fall into the precise molds one would predict, too, with the older girl rebellious (a string of sexual references she spews off at one point wants to be a variant of Meg Ryan’s famous orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” but fails miserably) and the young boy turning abruptly from a nerdy tyke into a hip-hopping gangsta wannabe (a pint-sized version of Jamie Kennedy’s “Malibu’s Most Wanted” character). To top it all off, there’s a streak of ostentatious materialism suffusing the movie that’s almost as gross as its sex-obsession. Put it all together and “Soul Plane” seems a gruesome act of pandering to the basest instincts of its audience, and at the same time the kind of glorification of those instincts that tells viewers that they’re somehow a cultural ideal.

Maybe one shouldn’t be too hard on “Soul Plane.” It’s not much worse that many other recent examples of this new kind of blaxploitation flick. But coming from the same studio that gave us the two “Barbershop” movies, which avoided the stereotypes and had warmth as well as humor, it’s a terrible let-down.