BATTLE OF THE YEAR (Benson Lee). 109 minutes. Opens Friday (September 20). See listings. Rating: N
The bar for urban-flavoured dance movies has already been set pretty low, but Battle Of The Year effortlessly leans back and limbos on below it.
Director Benson Lee revisits the titular world championship breakdancing tournament he covered in his 2007 documentary, Planet B-Boy (there’s even a scene here shamelessly touting the doc’s availability on Netflix), but he barely builds a movie around the event.
In this typical underdog sports story, an unlikely coach (Josh Holloway) gets his shit together to lead a group of raging misfits (Chris Brown among them) to stop battling each other so they can represent America and go to war with the Koreans (onstage, that is). The plot trots through these overly familiar steps as if it’s doing the macarena, and the banal writing and limp acting doesn’t help.
None of that really matters, since what people line up to see in this kind of movie are the moves. But that’s where Battle Of The Year truly fails to bring it. The epic dances don’t arrive until the last half hour, and when they do, they’re underwhelming.
The filmmakers constantly cut away from the action for new angles or interrupt the flow so sports announcers can describe what the film should showing instead. The 3D amplifies the problem, creating a stuttering effect as if it can’t keep up with the talent, making the dancers look like bouncing propellers.
Seemingly determined to not let us enjoy the cinematic potential of dancing, Lee might as well just throw hands up in the air in front of the camera to block our vision.
Oh, wait. He does that, too.
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