Beware the multi-hyphenate. Though there are plenty of examples of cross-disciplinary artists who are successful in more than one realm, it’s worth treating the feature filmmaking debut of a famous musician with skepticism. Is this a new artistic statement piece worthy of our attention, proof that the beloved artist’s creativity is indeed boundless? Or is it merely a feather in the cap of a self-described “creative,” leveraging their commercial success in one field to achieve every dream under the sun? If Anderson .Paak’s film K-Pops! is more of the latter, it’s also inoffensive, a film limited more by its meager ambitions than by apparent lack of talent. Maybe one day .Paak will make a great film, but here he hasn’t even tried.
.Paak stars as BJ, a down-on-his-luck karaoke bar drummer who travels to Korea to take a job on a reality show called Wildcard, an American Idol-esque search for the next big thing in K-Pop, in the hopes of cozying up to the show’s top talent and kickstarting his own career as a real artist. The setup here offers potentially rich material as BJ, whose absent father was Korean, doesn’t have a clue about K-pop but, like most music “except for classical and polka,” it has appropriated heavily from the musical tradition of Black Americans. But any potential culture clash is mostly left unexplored, limited to a small repertoire of tired jokes repeated ad nauseam. How many famous rappers can a man be mistaken for in one film?
BJ’s careerist plans take a turn when he discovers that the youngest (and lowest ranked) competitor on Wildcard, Tae Young, is the son he never knew he had, the result of a relationship 12 years in the rearview which ended because of BJ’s obsessive focus on music. His ex-girlfriend, Yeji (Jee Young Han), left the U.S. for Korea when they broke up and never told BJ she was pregnant. BJ is determined to make up for lost time and takes the boy under his wing, teaching him about Black culture and training him musically in the hopes that he can rise through the ranks to win Wildcard.
Tae Young is played by Soul Rasheed, Anderson .Paak’s son, and has an easy rapport with his father. According to .Paak, making a film about K-pop was rooted in his desire to connect with his son’s interests, and casting his real son as his fictional son points to K-Pops! being a pretty personal project for the musician. But the film’s sleek, televisual style is anonymously professional, and the script traffics in clichés about fatherhood and emotional maturity. Rather than drill into something specific about his own family, .Paak has simply mapped aspects of his experience onto the generic roadmap of a gently funny family comedy.
Even the film’s scattered musical performances are lackluster and presented as they would be on network television, without flair or a particular eye toward emphasizing style and choreography, a massive missed opportunity when dealing with such a dance-focused form as K-pop. Aside from the original music that soundtracks the film, the closest thing we get to an authorial stamp from the director is a parade of cameos that sometimes lend the world verisimilitude, like K-pop stars G-Dragon and SEVENTEEN’s Vernon, but largely come across like .Paak is showing off the contacts in his phone, as we get appearances from the likes of Diplo, Saweetie, iShowSpeed, Kirk Franklin, and, in one extremely corny scene, Earth, Wind & Fire. Anderson .Paak’s music is buoyant and groovy, easy to like but infused with enough creative spark to stand out from other commercial pop. That his feature filmmaking debut is merely pleasant is a disappointment. It’s by no means a disaster, but that at least might have been more interesting.
DIRECTOR: Anderson .Paak; CAST: Anderson .Paak, Soul Rasheed, Jee Young Han, Cathy Shim, Kevin Woo; DISTRIBUTOR: Aura Entertainment; IN THEATERS: February 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
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