Lack of cohesion blows holes in urban ghost movie

In “Bones” four attractive young people from the ‘burbs buy a creepy-looking building deep in the heart of a deteriorating center city; their plan is to convert the slum into a hip nightclub.

What they don’t know is that the building is haunted by the ghost of Jimmy Bones (rapper Snoop Dog), a benevolent ghetto godfather who was murdered 22 years ago when he rejected a plan by dealers and crooked cops to distribute crack cocaine. Buried in the basement, Jimmy’s ghost has been waiting all these years for just the right circumstances to take revenge.

Apparently a mob of trendy club hoppers is just what he needed to get motivated. Before long the bodies are piling up and the ceiling is raining wriggling maggots. (Survival hint: When you’re walking down the sidewalk, and the door of an old boarded-up building opens by itself, don’t go in.)

There’s no internal logic at work in “Bones”; screenwriters Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe just throw in any old idea that pops into their heads, and the characters are so laughably insubstantial that it’s impossible to care when they’re threatened or gruesomely dispatched.

A mishmash of clashing tones barely held together by nonstop special effects, “Bones” is being touted as Snoop Dog’s debut as the star of a film. Not hardly. The rapper has shown promise in brief character roles in “Baby Boy” and “Training Day,” but here he displays no range and less emotion. Mostly he models ’70s pimp costumes. He’s not even on screen very often.

The supporting players include such familiar faces as Pam Grier (as Jimmy’s old flame), comic Ricky Harris and “The Pretender’s” Michael T. Weiss (virtually unrecognizable beneath facial prostheses that age him about 25 years). None is given much to work with.

Nor does director Ernest Dickerson (“Juice,” “Bulletproof”) find a narrative style that can unite all this nonsense. “Bones” veers without warning from gruesome sadism to black humor (a couple of street-jiving severed heads) to overworked suspense clichés.

The film’s real value may be as a barometer of how our popular entertainments are dealing with questions of racial identity.

Virtually all of the young characters in the film — they’re played by Khalil Kain, Merwin Mondesir, Sean Amsing and Katharine Isabelle — are of mixed-race backgrounds. Three of them are siblings born of a white mother and an African-American father. They’ve moved to the ‘hood, but grew up in middle-class suburbia.

And they joke about it, commenting ironically on the fact that they can claim to belong to two races or decline to be identified with either.

Most of “Bones” is instantly forgettable. But the notion that to these young people the labels “black” and “white” are meaningless — that lingers well after the rest of the movie has evaporated.