Pootie Tang is not bad so much as inexplicable. You watch in puzzlement: How did this train wreck happen? How was this movie assembled out of such ill-fitting pieces? Who thought it was funny? Who thought it was finished? For that matter, was it finished? Take away the endless opening titles and end credits, and it s about 70 minutes long. The press notes say it comes from the comedy laboratory of HBO s Emmy Award-winning `Chris Rock Show. It s like one of those lab experiments where the room smells like swamp gas and all the mice are dead.
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Lance Crouther stars as Pootie Tang, a folk hero who has gained enormous popularity, even though nobody can understand a word he says. He crusades against the evil Lecter Corp., which sells cigarettes, booze, drugs and fast food to kids. Pootie is a regular character on The Chris Rock Show and has a following, but he s more suited to skits than to a feature film or at least to this feature film, which is disorganized, sense