After the nearly two hours that precede it, that sequence feels like a glamorous dream, one that ``Idlewild" should have been 100-odd minutes earlier. Instead, it's a sludgy, badly photographed, poorly edited bungle whose musical numbers never pop.
Neither do its two stars, Benjamin and his artistic partner, Antwan ``Big Boi" Patton. They play musicians in a Georgia speakeasy called Church, and, as on their best-selling double-CD, 2003's ``Speakerboxxx/The Love Below," the duo spends very little time together.
Percival (Benjamin) is a mortician's son whose true passion is songwriting. He lives with his daddy in a bedroom with a wall covered in cuckoo clocks. Percival plays piano in Church's house band and starts a thing with the just-arrived beauty who calls herself a singer. She's played by Paula Patton, a woman whose skin is the color of café au lait and whose acting is decaf Beyoncé.
While these two spend the entire movie gearing up for her big number (not a showstopper, mind you -- at least, not in a good way), Rooster (Big Boi ) is trying to keep a slick gangster (Terrence Howard) from taking the nightclub's profits. Rooster is also trying to keep his fed-up wife (Malinda Williams) from taking their five kids and moving in with her momma. (Rooster, like all Roosters before him, drinks, cheats, and struts around in flashy suits.)
Written and directed by music-video maker Bryan Barber, the film is a disappointing collision of Eddie Murphy's ``Harlem Nights" and Baz Luhrmann's ``Moulin Rouge." That's too bad, since the movie ``Idlewild" sporadically evokes, with its fierce cast and would-be jumping musical sequences, is Vincente Minnelli's ``Cabin in the Sky."
Instead, a lot of wasted talent washes up. In addition to Howard, who spends what feels like his first 20 minutes standing in silence behind Ving Rhames, the cast includes Ben Vereen, Patti LaBelle, Paula Jai Parker (as enjoyably uncouth as ever), and Cicely Tyson, who steals her second movie this year. (Perhaps you caught her porch sermon in ``Madea's Family Reunion.") Honestly, though, nobody in this movie out performs his hair. In a Hollywood first, there are enough marcelled waves, perms, S-curls, weaves, wigs, and blow-outs to constitute a black-hair convention.
