Blame it on Hollywood. For his seventh album, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges—SAG Award winner, star of Max Payne and RocknRolla and, oh yeah, rapper—has gone big-screen conceptual. His guest MCs are “costars”; several songs borrow movie or TV titles; even the production is Tinseltown, all red-carpet horns and beats as subtle as a spotlight. It’s just too bad he didn’t write a better script. Punch line for punch line, Luda is still the best in the business (e.g., promising to get ladies “wetter than Michael Phelps”), but these sex jams and hater disses feel too flat and perfunctory for his thousand-watt personality. By the time Spike Lee shows up for “Do the Right Thing,” a message song about staying in school that’s just as thrilling as it sounds, the whole thing seems less like an album than a branding exercise—an obligatory effort to keep the “hip-hop star” line on his CV.

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