Tuesday, May. 26, 2009

Early urinating dooms 'Dance Flick'

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

I may never have felt more doomed gearing up to see a movie than I felt on my way to see Dance Flick.

-- Times, theaters.

You know how in medieval war movies when two kings are fighting over a bog or something, they go and drag the entire population of England out to chop each other into kidney pudding? And since everyone is always drinking ale instead of water, the best battle plan they can come up with is to find a big open field, throw a speech at their men about how dying is awesome, and then just have 10,000 men on foot run at each other as fast as they can?

I felt like the guy at the front who realizes a second too late he's running just a little faster than everyone behind him. Because all possibilities exist simultaneously in an infinitude of universes, it is theoretically possible that I will kill the first man I meet and then go on to hack down the 9,999 behind him. But if I had money -- and I obviously don't, because I'm some idiot foot soldier who'll never see an ounce of peat from that bog -- I would put it on me dying horribly before my feet even stopped running. And that Dance Flick would be crap.

Damon Wayans, Jr. runs with a crew of street dancers in deep to crimelord David Alan Grier. But Grier's one of those nice loansharks -- you can tell because he's wearing an enormous fatsuit, and it's hard to be upset about anything when you weigh 600 pounds -- so he gives them until the end of the week to pay him back.

Meanwhile, Shoshana Bush has just moved to the city and Wayans' high school following the ballet-related death of her mother. She's sworn off dance forever, but Wayans' passion and well-defined thighs might be just what she needs to rekindle her dreams.

Not that there's any real attempt at a story in Dance Flick, a supremely lame spoof comedy whose idea of satire is to cut whole characters and scenes from other dance movies and patch them up into one big stupid quilt that needs to have the pox burned out of it. Attacking this toothless movie is like attacking one of those cancer-dogs who wags its tail all day long because it has no idea who anyone is any more, but screw it — I'm a bad person.

That sense of a barely-there plot overwhelmed by a barrage of arbitrary gags may have something to do with the fact Dance Flick was written so many different Wayanses that some of them haven't even been born yet. Remember the stripper theory of screenwriters: one or two is fine, any more than that and everyone just gets confused and bad-sweaty. The movie's writing credits read like that first draft of War and Peace where Tolstoy lost it halfway through and started copying the backs of cereal boxes for 1,200 pages.

Yet for all those scribes scrabbling for all those jokes, all they managed was about two real laughs. The rest is a poison stew of bland writing, unimaginative spoofing, edgeless social commentary, and body function humor where the joke is that it's gross.

The main problem is one of tone. In trying to crack wise about everything, Dance Flick has nothing at its center to tie itself together with, comedically or otherwise.

I like to find something positive about everything I watch, so here goes: Wayans Jr.'s thug friend Affion Crockett is a funny man and deserves to be in actual movies. Also, there was room for way more eye-rolling physical comedy than they actually used. Kudos on the restraint, Wayanses. This could have been much more insufferable.

Still, when your movie has a man urinating in another man's face within the first minute of screen time, you're either looking at a masterpiece or a movie where people bolt out of the theater so fast they somehow leave flaming tire treads on the carpet. Guess which?

Grade: D