Reel Review Roundup

Street Dance 2 (PG)

Directed by: Max Giwa, Dania Pasquini

Starring: Falk Hentschel, Sofia Boutella, Tom Conti

One star

Review by: Julian Wright

Coming out of the cliché ridden, mind numbingly simple Street Dance 2, my friends and I continued to laugh at (not with, at) the holes in the script, poor logic and wretched acting. We shrugged and one of us said “Well, you don’t expect much from these kinds of films.” And it struck me. Why not? Just because a film is about dancing, film makers should lower their ambitions and we should lower our expectations?

While I have no problem with film makers wanting to showcase the talents of international dancers – I enjoy a good choreographed sequence  as much as the next person – how about they spend as much time on the script as they do on the dance moves? Understandably, the director/s are working with people of limited acting capability, but surely this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to flesh out the characters or side-step cliché.

Dancer Ash (Falk Hentschel) tries a few moves at a competition in Paris in front of a large crowd and popular street dance crew Invincible but (pause for effect) stumbles a move, falls on his backside and is pelted with (wait for it) handfuls of popcorn. Embarrassing, for sure, but this incident has hurt his confidence. Branded with the nickname Popcorn boy (ouch), Ash is prompted to gather the best street dancers in Europe and knock Invincible from its perch.

The old saying “easier said than done” does not apply here because the financially struggling street dancer manages to plane, train and automobile his way around several European countries, with his pre-pubescent looking manager Eddie (George Sampson) in tow, to recruit his rag-tag team and then scrimps on the accommodation, putting them up in a dingy hostel.

But who these dancers are is of little consequence. All we get is a freeze frame shot of each one accompanied by their first name. Any development beyond that is purely coincidental. But who needs character development when the biggest hook for this film, and possibly the main reason it was even made, is Ash’s desire to mix dance styles. That’s right, he wants to blow Invincible out of the water with a dance routine that mixes street style with a Latin flavour. This only happens after he meets sizzling fire cracker Eva (Sofia Boutella). So really he is just doing it to get close to the hot chick.

After a while the dance routines (and there are a lot of them) blur together and it is difficult to distinguish styles at all. Montages imply the group are training to mesh the two styles together, but it is virtually impossible to tell if they are even successful in their venture. Eventually, it just feels like padding on what is a bare bones idea for a feature film, anyway. It is the kind of film you inevitably end up having a few chuckles at because of how bad it is, but it still does not justify its existence, or your money for the barely-there 3D effects. All we can do is shrug.

This entry was posted on April 10, 2012 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.