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Battle of the Year: When Dance Isn’t Enough

By Emily Holland · September 23, 2013

It’s never a good sign when you are the only person in the movie theater on a Friday. I’m not talking about being one out of 10 others; I’m talking about being the single soul who dared to buy a ticket. That’s how it was when I went to see Battle of the Year and when I left the theater, I understood why.

You have a certain amount of freedom when you’re the only one in a theater. You can check your phone when the movie doesn’t keep your interest, you can sit wherever you want and even move around during the movie without bothering anyone, and you can play Candy Crush. I’m sorry to say that I did all of these things when I was sitting through two hours of possibly the most cliché-filled dance movie ever created.

The plot is one we’ve seen many times before, just with new character attributes: Jason Blake, an alcoholic retired basketball coach and previous all-star break-dancer, portrayed by Lost’s hunky Josh Holloway, is recruited by his old friend and über successful businessman Dante (Laz Alonso) to coach a B-Boy team to the world championship. What ensues is a tale of overcoming personal demons, building teamwork, and battling against the odds, or basically any underdog sports movie ever made.

Part of me wants to describe Battle of the Year as “Pitch Perfect for dudes and dancers,” but that’s giving it too much credit. Sure, there were some laughable moments, but there was no outright comedy like there was in the musical blockbuster. But, just like the music in Pitch Perfect was fun and entertaining, the dancing in Battle of the Year was exciting and neat to watch. Other than that, there are no real selling points for the film.

There was also no real reason for this movie to be in 3D, aside from the fact that 3D is immensely popular right now (for whatever reason, I cannot say). It did not add anything spectacular to the dancing, which, admittedly, is pretty cool on its own. Putting it in 3D just made me feel as if I were about to be kicked in the face and I would have rather been able to just enjoy the art of breakdancing as a 2D experience.

Perhaps the main downfall of the film is its cast. The only super big name is Chris Brown who, quite frankly, has fallen by the wayside after his widely publicized abusive relationship with Rihanna. Josh Peck is in prime physical form, but he’s already had his glory days as a teen entertainer, and his character as the assistant coach did not give him anything but a few corny jokes and some cliché self-confidence lessons. It’s time for him to move to more mature projects. Holloway is relatively unknown despite his role in the beloved television series Lost and all of the other cast members are actual B-Boys. While I appreciate the fact that these talented dancers were able to participate in the film, they didn’t add any star power, which the film desperately needed. They did, however, add dance power, which may be the only good aspect of the entire movie.

For a film focused on making B-Boys and breakdancing cool again, it doesn’t do much to draw in an audience. Recent box-office hits have been those that push the boundaries of what we’ve seen before. Even remakes of classics, such as Star Trek, have drawn huge audiences because they are fresh, new reinventions. Battle of the Year takes the same clichéd lines of any teambuilding film and recycles them to fit the dying world of breakdancing.

There are ups and downs, a lot of yelling by Holloway’s hardened coach character, a couple good locker room pump-ups, and, of course, the heartbreaking defeat. It is a well-tested formula that has worked for many other movies such as Coach Carter, Hoosiers, and Glory Road, but it does not translate well for Battle of the Year.

The three aforementioned films are basketball stories, an element director Benson Lee and writers Brin Hill and Chris Parker must have valued in their storytelling formula because before Coach Blake was an alcoholic and the coach of “The Dream Team,” he was a highly successful basketball coach. These coaching elements were clear in the character’s tough no-excuses philosophies, but they did not bring out any new elements that make a dance coach different from a basketball coach. In fact, if you were to cut out all of the shots of the dancers training and rehearsing and instead put in footage from basketball games and practices with Blake’s yelling, the movie might be more compelling.

When trying to bring an old art form back into the spotlight, it might be best to do it with a fresh script and great cast rather than a hand-me-down collection of lines and mystery set of actors. The art of breakdancing is one that used to be popular; America’s Best Dance Crew was one of the most popular shows on MTV, which may not be saying much, but I surely enjoyed watching people dance in ways that didn’t seem humanly possible. So, the idea behind Battle of the Year is a good one. But nothing, not even amazing hip-hop dancing, can overcome a poor script and an even worse cast.