Starring:Cuba Gooding Jr., Beyonce Knowles, Mike Epps

‘Fighting Temptations’ not all that tempting

A few words of advice for Paramount Pictures, which last weekend released “The Fighting Temptations”:Please don’t do that again. Resist the urge. Fight the temptation.

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And for God’s sake, PLEASE do something about Cuba Gooding Jr. He’s even starting to embarrass some of us in the audience.

I mean, no offense. “The Fighting Temptations” is all right, perhaps even cute in its wishy-washy, “Barbershop” rip-off kind of way. But cute can take you only so far. After that, you’re only left an insipid plot, boring characters and a film that lumbers along at the speed of sand.

You’re going to toss in some music, you say? A little Beyonce Knowles, a.k.a. Cutest Girl in American Entertainment? That’s great. I like her, too. But tell me:How could you possibly have made her boring, too?

Anything’s possible in the movies, I suppose. Except, of course, even a shred of original thinking, which “The Fighting Temptations,” serving as a template for dull, by-the-numbers filmmaking, lacks entirely. From mediocre acting to a script that just feels plain stupid, “Temptations” is a tour de force of truly crap-tastic movie making, and although it admittedly has a little bit of soul, it doesn’t have a clue how to effectively use it.

It all has something to do with Darrin Fox (Gooding), a low-level advertising executive who finds out his good-ol’, down-home Aunt Sally has died and left him a significant inheritance of $150,000. Of course, in a situation such as this, there’s a catch:He has to return to his southern roots and lead his hometown church gospel choir to the Gospel Explosion championship.

What he encounters is a sparse choir with no note-able talent, and he enlists the help of Lilly (Knowles), a local nightclub singer, to help fill in the holes and so that he has someone to shamelessly hit on. Do they make it to the Gospel Explosion? The suspense will kill you. Does Darrin get his girl? You’ll have to wait and find out. Does he have an inner revelation about what sort of materialistic creep he is when compared with his southern friends? Be sure to stay tuned.

Of course, by the time “The Fighting Temptations” rolls into act three and offers answers to these tough questions, it appears as though even the film has lost interest in itself. It rushes through scenes, making a sloppy mess of itself, and it ends with such an implausible happiness and impossible character evolutions that it becomes nothing short of an unfunny joke.

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Sometimes the film offers some real sparkle, but these moments are far between. Knowles, who added pure energy to last year’s “Austin Powers in Goldmember,” puts on a good show here, sizzling during all of her musical numbers, most notably the song “Fever.”

For that matter, all of the film’s musical numbers serve as some sort of justification for the movie’s existence, but even they smack of the mundane. “The Blues Brothers” did evangelical gospel much better.

So, to the studio:We’re sending this one back. It was cute, maybe even inspiring a bit of toe tapping, but it drudges along at such a mortifyingly dumb pace that I, frankly, am surprised that people make it to the other end alive.

And Cuba:What happened? Didn’t you win an Oscar or something? If you keep this up too long, nobody’s going to show you any money; after all, the temptation to see you is getting easier and easier to fight.