Dance Flick Reviews

"From the Wayan Brothers comes the most outrageous movie of the year," the trailer for Dance Flick promised. In one sense, this is correct - it's an outage that precious reels of celluloid were imprinted with this lazy, cheap, dire, tedious, obnoxious and desperate attempt to induce laugher. And that's just a small selection of disparaging adjectives which can be applied to this tripe.

Dance Flick is just another in the long line of excruciating spoof films begat by the Scary Movie series. Said franchise also inadvertently unleashed upon the world the writer-director team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, and their creations (Epic Movie, Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie) somehow managed to earn a fortune at the box office while also being universally despised. These recent spoof "comedies" forget one very crucial thing about the genre: they forget to actually be funny. They're miles away from the belly-laugh miracles of the Airplane! and Naked Gun era. Dance Flick is merely a barrage of pointless pop culture references, ghastly stereotypes and overt spoofing - all of which unite to deter laughter. The film was created by the Wayans, and while they weren't responsible for many of the other dire parodies of recent years, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Less a baseline story than a platform on which to showcase a series of unfunny, disparate sketches, this is a spoof of (logically) every dance film imaginable (running the gamut from Fame to Step Up 2 The Streets). While there are plenty of movies that fit this criterion, Dance Flick is inexplicably focused on 2001's Save the Last Dance. It adapts that particular movie's plot almost scene-for-scene, probably because the filmmakers couldn't be bothered coming up with something more creative on their own.
To an extent, there is a plot (however paltry). It concerns a white, naïve ex-dancer named Megan (Bush) who moves in with her father (Elliot) after her mother dies in a car accident. She hooks up with black street dancer Thomas (Wayans Jr.) and together they aim to compete in a local contest to scoop some much-needed cash. You see, Thomas needs money to pay larger-than-life gangster Sugar Bear (Grier) - who looks like a cross between Fat Bastard and Mr. Creosote.

As with other recent spoofs, the satirical elements of Dance Flick aren't restricted to dance films. One of the most unbearable failed gags of the movie comes at the expense of Twilight. There are also parodies of Black Snake Moan, Catwoman (WTF?!) and even Little Miss Sunshine merely to get the film up to its barely feature-length runtime. The puerile attempts to raise laughs lack subtlety, skilful direction or any degree of intelligence. Instead, there's a junior version of Ray Charles (with his blindness cruelly used as a launching pad for numerous "comedic" mishaps) and a dance instructor named Ms. Cameltoé (Sedaris). Guess what? Yep, Ms. Cameltoé has a noticeably large vagina...and it even beatboxes!

Dance Flick also contains a large variety of potty jokes, racial jokes and hackneyed gags (for instance the music at one stage overwhelms a character who's speaking, so he turns to the orchestra and tells them to quiet down). All this pushes the film's PG-13 rating to the very brink. The point is not that this stuff is offensive, but that it's so insufferably terrible. Exposition and random skits and mashed together willy-nilly with no concern for making a coherent motion picture, and the end result looks and feels like what one would expect from a bunch of kids screwing around with a camera during a family reunion (considering the number of Wayans involved, this could actually be the case here). There's an unexpected amount of energy here (particularly during the dance numbers), but this cannot excuse the tragic deficiency of laughs and the fact that the whole thing is just plain gruelling.

Recently, so many genre parody movies have been made that they no longer carry a novelty factor, making Dance Flick tedious and familiar. This is the very definition of critic-proof - if you want to view this bottom-feeding cash-grab that caters to the lowest common denominator, you've already made up your mind and no amount of reviews will persuade you otherwise. For those of you who adored Disaster Movie or Meet the Spartans, you're welcome to indulge in this tosh...but please keep it away from the rest of us. You know, some of the worst dance movies actually exist as self-parodies, so what the fuck is the point of parodying them anyway???

1.5/10