Soul Men

Bernie Mac and Samuel L. Jackson star in this difficult-to-love, harder-to-hate movie about music. And yes, the plot of Soul Men revolves around a road trip of sorts. This movie is the last from the stable of director Malcolm D. Lee who also made the famous Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.
Floyd and Louis (played by Mac and Jackson) are on their way to New York where they are meant to sing melodies at a funeral. An old friend, also a musician, has passed away and this is going to be a final tribute to him. Both of the travelling musicians have run out of gigs and that happened a long time ago. A decade or more has passed. Floyd is now whiling away his time in a retirement village, while Louis has retired to a seedy old flophouse.
The two friends also haven’t met each other in decades, or spoken at all. But now, on their way to New York from Los Angeles, they perform at cheap hotels and also in other unlikely dens. Eventually they bump into a woman as old as their daughter would have been.
The movie survives, for the most part, off the personalities of these two aging musicians. So far apart are they, and their lives so distant now from each other’s, that the effect is comic when they are put together by circumstance. The humour, however, is bittersweet and a bit odd. It will not have you rolling on the floor in stitches, but it will surprise you with its strangeness instead.
Soul Men is not a great film. But it is Bernie Mac’s final film, which makes the not-so-grand exit a bit more sad.