BEFORE: Sticking with musicians for another week - tonight a fictional famous soul group takes the stage. Well, it is Black History Month, isn't it? Or is that February?
THE PLOT: The story of the rise and fall of an African American vocal group.
AFTER: Yeah, there's a lot of the same territory covered already in a bunch of other films - like "Cadillac Records", "That Thing You Do!", "What's Love Got to Do With It", "A Star Is Born", etc. etc. It's the struggle to get famous, and then once that's achieved, the struggle to stay together and stay successful.
As with "Great Balls of Fire!", I found some of the sequences here to be very phony - especially the songwriting sequence, when a whole band track is heard, but there's no band in the room. OK, so the music's supposed to be in their heads, but still Duck manages to grab JUST the right scrap of paper at JUST the right moment to supply the lyrics without missing a beat. Come on...unbelievable.
There's also a lot of cookie-cutter elements that are probably cribbed from the real-life history of The Temptations, or the Commodores, or the Spinners. Which music group DIDN'T have a record executive try to stiff them on royalty checks? Or which group DIDN'T have a member get mixed up with hard drugs? Or have group members fight over a woman? As a result a lot of it just seemed fakey and forced.
Starring Robert Townsend (last seen in "The Mighty Quinn"), Leon (last seen in "Colors", but more famous for being on HBO's "Oz"), Michael Wright (another member of the "Oz" cast), Diahann Carroll, with cameos from John Witherspoon, Eddie Griffin.
RATING: 5 out of 10 album covers
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