Dance Flick (2009)
Directed by Damien Dante Wayans
Written by Keenan Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Craig Wayans
Starring Shoshana Bush, Damon Wayans Jr, Essence Atkins, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans
Release Date May 22nd, 2009
Published May 23rd, 2009
Streaming on Starz via Amazon Prime (Subscription)
The spoof movie hasn't been funny since Airplane 2. Fact. You want to talk Naked Gun? It's not necessarily a spoof movie. A spoof movie is one that takes particular movies or genres and aims to send up their inherent ideas and conventions. Scary Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Date Movie. There is not one laugh in any of these movies.
What we get instead are a series of thuddingly obvious jokes, vague impressions and head scratching vulgarity without any real aim. Dance Flick joins this laughless group.
Directed by Damian Dante Wayans, Dance Flick takes on the conventions of the dance movie starting with the premise of the 2000 drama Save The Last Dance and integrating it with riffs on You Got Served, Step Up and Stomp The Yard. It's not exactly timely. Save The Last Dance which gives Dance Flick its form and plot is nearly a decade old. Step Up 2 bombed last year and my memory of You Got Served and Stomp The Yard would have run together years ago were it not for IMDB.
Given the nature of our moderm media being timely while making movies is not easy. Movies take several months to make and by the time a movie like Dance Flick is completed and released the movies being riffed on are already well out of the cultural memory.
That hasn't stopped the Wayans Brothers in the past from desperately and vainly attempting to be of the moment and their spawn, the makers of Epic Movie, the Scary Movie sequels, Disaster Movie and the like from trying to be timely and failing miserably. In this way, Damian Dante Wayans is really a risk taker, he picks an older movie and sticks to it giving his movie a form that doesn't necessarily rely on timeliness.
Sure, some of the jokes feel a little past their sell by date but they are slightly less desperate than those of other similar movies. Unfortunately, they're just as unfunny. Dance Flick despite not sweating the times Dance Flick still fails to find the funny by crafting jokes so obvious, dumb and outright insulting that the audience spends more time predicting the next joke than laughing at it.
There is one laugh in the movie. It comes when Damian Wayans as the star of the film Thomas and Shoshanna Bush, riffing Julia Stiles luckless character from Save The Last Dance, are talking about her mother dying and Wayans goes off blaming her for her mother's death. It's mostly Wayans' manner that is funny and not necessarily any particular joke, but funny is funny. I laughed.
The biggest obstacle to the parody of Dance Flick is the fact that the targets themselves are so earnestly committed to their dancing premises that they really are send ups of themselves. Movies like Save The Last Dance or Step Up or You Got Served are so campy in their earnest attempts at making dance seem like the most important thing in the world that, in a way, that earnestness beoomes shield from the kind of mocking dealt out in Dance Flick. If something is already ridiculous how does one make it more ridiculous?
Dance Flick doesn't stink nearly as bad as Disaster Movie, Date Movie, Scary Movie or the like but that is a pretty low bar. As I said before there is one laugh in this movie and that's it. If one laugh is good enough for you then absolutely see Dance Flick. Why pay 7 to 11 dollars to see something like Dance Flick when movies it parodies like Save The Last Dance, Stomp The Yard, Step Up and You Got Served themselves have inherently humorous moments that nearly send up themselves.
