Writer(s): Amy George and Mark Goodman
Starring: Shane Harper, Kathryn McCormick, Finola Hughes, and Carolyn Hennesy
On the surface, Dance-Off is your typical “two dancers fall in love” movie. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find—okay, that’s really all this is at its core: A movie with far too little “dance” and plenty of “off”. But there’s an almost endearing incompetence behind the whole production that makes it far more interesting than it should be, thanks to a complete lack of direction or understanding of basic compositional techniques: punchlines are offered to jokes without set-up, characters are introduced without explanation, and the narrative story is so abysmally cobbled together, that parts of it feel like a fever dream.
Our protagonists here are Brandon and
Jasmine, two dancers from rival dance schools who are competing in a
nationwide competition to decide the best of the best. Of course,
they will fall in love, but there’s at least some history behind
them: as children, they were dance partners, until Brandon’s mother
suddenly moved him out of town. Jasmine blames him for not saying
goodbye to her (the tone-deaf opening scene finds Brandon’s mom
driving away from Jasmine, who chases after the car), while Brandon
blames her for not reaching out at any point during the intervening
years.
Also blaming Brandon is Jasmine’s
domineering mother, JoAnn, who is that ridiculously over-the-top
villain these movies seem to find humorous. You know the type:
complaining to the dance instructor when her daughter isn’t front
and center in a routine, critiquing anyone and everyone down to the
tiniest detail, and flashing her money around, as if self-justifying
her terrible behavior. I imagine characters such as these started as
a biting satire of rich folk, but by now that bite has been shaved
down to a butterknife; they’ve just become a tired retread of one
another, and a lazy by-the-numbers villain for writers who don’t
have the mental capacity to come up with an original one of their
own.
And with that setup begins one of the most tone-deaf love
stories in history, with Jasmine seemingly unable to decide if she
likes him or loathes him (seriously, she goes from obsessively
watching YouTube videos of his past performances, to being a
stone-cold cunt to him in person; it goes so quickly from one extreme
to the other that you really just want to see him move on). Brandon,
meanwhile, is clearly infatuated with her, much to the chagrin of
fellow group member Simone, who shows she’s infatuated with him
by being a complete bitch and trying to control every aspect of his
life.
Of course, not only do they drag this
whole substanceless relationship out for 90 minutes, but it also just
so happens to come down to their two teams in the finals, with the
winner foreshadowed with all the subtlety of a bullet to the skull:
Brandon’s school, Shockwave Studios, is struggling so bad
financially that the lights go off during practice, they have to get
financial assistance to travel, liquid that looks like chocolate milk sprays from the pipes,
and the school’s owner, one Mr. Ray, can’t even afford sweaters
that don’t fall apart at the slightest nudge of a thread. Gee, I
wonder if they’ll win enough money to save the school at the
expense of the other school who is loaded with money!
The only time the movie even has a
pulse are during the surprisingly solid dance numbers, which are
either far too infrequent, or just feel that way, with the multitude
of issues the movie faces when it has to rely on developing its
characters frequently standing front and center. It’s like a tale
of two movies: Brandon and Jasmine lack complete chemistry when
they’re talking, but put on some music and the two explode and
sparkle like they’ve longed for each other their whole lives. And
Kathryn McCormick is gorgeous as Jasmine, which at least gives
viewers something to latch on to when nothing else interesting is
happening on screen.
Unfortunately, “nothing interesting”
takes up about 80% of its duration, leaving you with a lot of time to
wonder where your life went wrong. Even with the admittedly solid dancing and surrealistic
environment—which only provides sudden unexpected moments of
non-sequitur “humor” that wear off almost as quickly as they
appear—Dance-Off is a complete turd.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS
- Adding to the fever dream atmosphere: Mr. Ray’s indescribably bizarre assistant, who lurches around lankily and stares at him so frequently, that I think we’re supposed to gather that she is infatuated with him, even though it's a sidestory that’s never even slightly acknowledged. Probably because Mr. Ray has no interest in a woman that looks like she was created in a lab.
- JoAnn’s other daughter, a chubby young girl named London (Marlowe Peyton) who is frequently the butt of her mother’s jokes, is by far the most genuinely likable character in this whole mess.
- Speaking of which, JoAnn’s constant fat-shaming of her young daughter is pretty harsh, and will be way out-of-bounds with today’s audiences (I’ll admit to being a terrible person: I actually found some of the comments funny, but it’s unnecessarily unrelenting.)
- An example of what the writers think is a funny idea: One of the judges during the final dance sequences is always eating something different every time we see him. No explanation, no set-up: it's just baffling.
- Also baffling: the random appearance of a red-headed character, who just suddenly appears alongside JoAnn during a scene, and laughs hysterically at everything she says. She somehow ranks up there with London as being one of the best characters, even though she should be annoying as hell.
- Could they not afford music for the obligatory “pre-finals staredown”, in which characters from both warring sides do random dance moves against each other one-on-one? It’s kind of a bizarre scene considering they do it in complete silence.
- There’s no commitment to any of this material: At one point, Jasmine catches Brandon hugging a female dance partner (in an obviously platonic exchange), and storms off in apparent disgust. This is never brought up again.
- I don’t understand the reasoning behind having the final dance numbers—which are being performed in front of an audience live on stage—be interspersed with cuts of the same characters performing the same number on a raining city street. I guess that it was probably for visual flair, and probably could have worked in the right movie, but this one ain’t it.
RATING: 3/10
TRAILER
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