Keepin' It Surreal

Whiteboys is almost as short on substance as its poseur protagonists

Some cinematic targets of mockery are almost too easy. In most cases, it's because they've already been done to death: hypocritical evangelists, for instance, or high school athletes who beat up the smart kids. In other cases, like pimps or drag queens, it's hard to find anything new to say about people who are somewhat inherently self-mocking. Such is the case with the white wanna-be rapper. Not to say that it's impossible to effectively lampoon people of that sort (Seth Green did a pretty good job in Can't Hardly Wait), but it's tough to top the high watermark of unintentional self-mockery, Cool as Ice, Vanilla Ice's bizarre 1991 vehicle. The latest contender is Whiteboys, but despite occasional signs of potential, it won't be unseating the Iceman anytime soon.

Set mostly in a small town in Iowa, Whiteboys follows the exploits of three local boys who spend their time blasting hip-hop, freestyle rapping, spray painting old barns with graffiti, drinking forties, selling drugs (mainly pot and baking soda masquerading as cocaine), and peppering their conversation with frequent usage of the phrases "unh," "I'm representin'," "keepin' it real," and so on. There's Flip (performance artist Danny Hoch), who has bigger ambitions than the rest and intends to move to Chicago, which he imagines will have a "gangsta" culture where he will finally fit in; James (Dash Mihok), who carries a handgun and is particularly drawn to the violent images in rap music; and Trevor (Mark Webber), who comes from a higher income bracket than his two companions and seems to be into hip-hop just because it's what everyone else is into. Serving as unwitting inspiration to the trio is Khalid (Eugene Byrd), the town's token black kid, who is alternately bemused and insulted by their attempts to co-opt "black" culture, the entirety of which, as far as they know, begins and ends with Master P videos.

If all this sounds a bit like a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch, there's a good reason. Not only did Chris Farley play a regular character of this type opposite Chris Rock, but both the script and the character of Flip were derived from a sketch in one of Danny Hoch's stage shows, in which Flip hosted a Wayne's World-style cable-access show. Unsurprisingly, and unfortunately for the film, Hoch on-screen looks exactly like what he is -- a grown man playing a kid playing a rapper. He wears a cartoonish sneer on his face for the entire movie, undercutting the sense of reality (even phony reality, in Flip's case) that the rest of the cast strive so hard for. Further diluting the points that the film seems to be striving for are Flip's extended fantasy sequences, in which he imagines himself as the lead character in a series of archetypal rap videos (gangsta rapper as mafia Don, gangsta rapper as prisoner, etc.). Despite some amusing cameos by various rappers as themselves (Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, and Dr. Dre, among others), it feels as though director Marc Levin (Slam) knew he couldn't do a whole lot with the premise, so he had to come up with some padding fast, although the film is still only 89 minutes long.

The story does perk up quite a bit when the trio finally head to Chicago and find the hood to be a little more hostile than they anticipated. No longer protected by fantasy, Flip and his friends try to get Khalid to introduce them to drug dealers, and a sense of tension finally emerges. (Given that James had blown a guy's finger off early in the movie and suffered absolutely no repercussions, it seemed that nothing was ever going to shake these characters up in the slightest.) Slam star Bonz Malone turns in the film's best performance during this sequence, as a paroled convict who tries to hook the boys up, with (inevitably) disastrous consequences.

The drastic tonal differences between the Chicago sequence and the fantasy nonsense make one wonder if Hoch and Levin were able to agree on exactly where they wanted the film to go. Hoch would clearly be more comfortable playing the whole thing as an SNL-type extended-sketch movie, whereas Levin seems to be aiming at something more meaningful. Issues like unsafe sex and police racism are touched on only briefly, and there's a lot more that could be done with the contrasts and similarities between hip-hop homeboy stylings and redneck chic. There's even a tantalizing scene that hints at the conflict and commonalities between hard-core heavy metal kids and hard-core rappers, but this tangent is quickly jettisoned in favor of more scenes of Flip and Company striking goofy hand poses while beatboxing by blowing rhythmically into a malt liquor bottle. It's the movie's greatest irony that, like the characters it portrays, Whiteboys is ultimately insecure in its own identity and just about as substance-free as the exaggerated personae its antiheroes embrace.