film | Hey blah!

A visually lavish four-minute MTV clip that overstays its welcome by an increasingly leaden two hours, the hip-hopera IDLEWILD transplants the anachronistic pop huzzahs of Moulin Rouge to the gangland racketeering of prohibition-era Georgia, where Outkast's André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton don dapper period fashion as, respectively, a mopey pianist and a boisterous emcee at a bawdy dancehall known as "The Church." Listen, rag on Rouge all you want, but even its most bilious detractors would probably agree it was turbo-charged and rarely boring. Comparatively, Idlewild exudes the livelihood of one of the embalmed stiffs Benjamin tends to during his mortician day job, which is a damning shame for a pseudo-musical starring the rowdiest act on the rap charts.

Actually, Benjamin — who sounds pretty dead himself in Idlewild's on-off narration — and Patton don't fare terribly well next to the rest of the cast, particularly two actors from Hustle & Flow: the Oscar-nominated Terrence Howard, oozing cool menace as a nasty hoodlum, and Paula Jai Parker, a scene-stealing firecracker as a floozy showgirl. Otherwise, it's a lethargic retro-urban Rouge redux, with Hitch's Paula Patton (no relation to Antwan) in Nicole Kidman's doomed-chanteuse role, slow-motion Gap-commercial swing steps replacing the can-can, and a scatting flask in lieu of a singing absinthe bottle. Even worse, Idlewild seems leery of embracing its genre: The big production numbers are underwhelming and infrequent, and none of the songs — partially culled from Outkast's smash 2003 double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which should tell you how long this project has been growing mold in the studio vault — are instantaneously catchy enough to grab your attention. This is especially weird coming from a duo whose "Ms. Jackson," "Hey Ya!", "The Way You Move" and "Roses" are still memorable as hell years after their original release. D+