‘Back on the Strip’ Review: Just Some Mikes in Need of Magic

According to “Back on the Strip,” a tedious ensemble comedy from Chris Spencer, what makes a person a profitable stripper is just not attractiveness, the proper strikes, or a memorable stage persona: Being a real once-in-a-generation expertise, it posits, requires a considerable endowment down south. That’s what gave Mr. Big (Wesley Snipes), the chief of a once-famous male revue crew, his legendary standing, and it’s what permits him to see a prodigy in Merlin (Spence Moore II), a younger man who unintentionally reveals himself onstage throughout a disastrous magic present in Las Vegas.

After Mr. Big spots this promise, he will get his outdated squad, the Chocolate Chips, again collectively, now with Merlin on the helm. But Merlin’s so-called reward can be the gimmicky curse on the coronary heart of the film. Traveling to Vegas on the behest of his mom (Tiffany Haddish, whose voice-over relentlessly narrates virtually each scene), Merlin needs to change into knowledgeable magician, however his physique places him on a path that he feels is a compromise to that dream.

It’s each a disgrace and a surprise that the movie managed to assemble such a beefed-up roster of expertise — Snipes, Haddish, J.B. Smoove, Faizon Love and, in a cameo, Kevin Hart — for what quantities to a stilted, factory-line comedy.

Seeing Hart’s transient however flat cameo is a research in how even megawatt star energy may be rendered lifeless with out the proper writing and route. Snipes particularly will get misplaced in an overdone, confusingly drawn efficiency as a stud whose greatest days are behind him.

Back on the Strip
Rated R for intercourse stuff, language and a few drug use. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.