FILM REVIEW: Dance Flick

Toilet humour means more hits than misses


Cinema
Daniel Carey

I READ recently that Julia Stiles is to star in her own production of ‘The Bell Jar’, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel of mental illness. Stiles, star of ‘Save The Last Dance’ – the movie most clearly parodied in ‘Dance Flick’ – says that ‘The Bell Jar’ can be recast as a comedy.
“I don’t think it’s depressing at all,” Stiles said of the source material in an interview with MTV. “They must be wiping out a good portion of the book if electroshock therapy and suicide attempts aren’t depressing ‘at all’,” film critic Monika Bartyzel commented. “Or will these be funny and humorous bouts of electroshock therapy, mixed in with a song and dance number?”
Though there’s nothing quite that incongruous in ‘Dance Flick’, there may still be more humour in ‘The Bell Jar’ than in director Damien Dante Wayans’s feature film debut. True, ‘Dance Flick’ does produce a few laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s very much a hit-and-miss affair. Too much of the comedy is puerile, with gross-out gags preferred to satire. Heard enough unfunny jokes about farts or gay people? Too bad, here comes another one.
In that sense, it’s following a tradition that goes back to ‘Scary Movie’, the first of the Wayans family’s spoofs to hit our screens – and the last that I’ve actually seen. But while I was familiar with ‘Scream’, ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’, and most of the other blockbusters that were referenced in that send-up, dance is not my movie genre of choice. As a result, many of the references in ‘Dance Flick’ went over my head, though I did recognise bits of ‘Dirty Dancing’, ‘High School Musical’, ‘Fame’ and the aforementioned ‘Save The Last Dance’.
The plot, such as it is, has black boy Thomas (Damon Wayans Jr) meeting white girl Megan (Shoshana Bush). He’s a hip-hop lover who owes money to a fat gang leader. She lost her mother in a car accident and has sworn off dance since.
The ‘dance-off’ featured in the opening sequence isn’t bad, though it helps to leave your brain in the cinema foyer. Megan’s mum’s death is hilariously drawn out. Some of the running gags raise a smile, as when Thomas’s sister Charity proves her ‘parenting skills’ by bringing her baby everywhere – even to school, where she leaves him in a locker. Some of the best scenes are flashbacks, and there’s a knowing self-consciousness to much of the script. “I thought only the good guys get to go in slow motion,” Thomas notes wearily as an opponent executes a particularly elaborate dance manoeuvre.
Even the best punch-lines are of the groan-inducing variety. “I’m here to pick up my son,” Charity’s on/off boyfriend tells her, and he promptly lifts the child out of a pram before setting him down. “I’ll be back next week to pick him up again,” he explains, and promptly leaves the house.
But toilet humour is never far away, and the film displays a depressing level of interest in bodily functions. Too often, it goes for soft targets and cheap giggles at the expense of wit. To say the story is predictable is perhaps to give it too much credit – for much of its 87-minute running time, it’s more like a series of sketches. That works in funny motion pictures – like ‘Bruno’, which wasn’t exactly allergic to throwing in adolescent one-liners – but the proper laughs are too far apart here.
To rejig the old Garth Brooks song, if I had missed ‘Dance Flick’, I could have missed the pain.

Dance Flick rating 2 out of 5