The late '80s represented a golden age of innovation in hip-hop, but you'd never know it from watching Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song director Melvin Van Peebles' comically awful 1989 hip-hop comedy Identity Crisis. Van Peebles' first directorial work in more than 15 years opens with him addressing the audience directly, offering up a Cliffs Notes-style summary of the film's blindingly simple plot just in case the audience suffered blows to the head upon entering the theater. Van Peebles' son Mario plays Chilly D, an aspiring rapper and clothing designer whose life is thrown into turmoil when fruity French designer Richard Fancy dies and, through a pinch of magic and a dollop of terrible special effects, wakes up inside his body. This leads to much comical business, as when Van Peebles and his group The Funky Four (whose name, music, and clothes are all at least six years behind the curve) enter the Big Be Bop Rap Contest, only to be unpleasantly surprised by the frontman's flamboyantly gay behavior. Somehow, the entire group, along with Fancy's helpful son Ilan Mitchell-Smith, winds up in jail, perhaps for having stolen The Fat Boys' fashion sense. Broad comedies in the late '80s seemed legally obligated to include at least one smuggling subplot, and the one in Identity Crisis allows it to exploit at least one more stupid stereotype, as Mitchell-Smith and Van Peebles are pursued by swarthy, turban-clad drug smugglers. The younger Van Peebles also scripted, and he gives a woefully broad performance that alternately rips off Eddie Murphy and Rip Taylor, setting the stage for his latter-day career as a cut-rate direct-to-video action star. The elder Van Peebles, meanwhile, asserts his authorial voice by changing film stocks at random, speeding up the film a la Benny Hill, and popping up randomly to dispense such nuggets of wisdom as, "Light in the loafers doesn't always mean light in the head." (Needless to say, his "Fuck A Duck!" catch phrase failed to catch on.) Sadly, the film doesn't end with a big rap-off, but that's just about the only hip-hop-movie cliché it fails to exploit. Identity Crisis may not have done much at the box office, but at least it helped kill off the late-'80s body-switching-comedy craze for good.
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