Monday Movie Review: Feel the Beat
I am so ready to get back to the movies. Like, I’m not actually going to go when they reopen, but I miss going to the movies something fierce. For now, I have to satiate myself with these random new Netflix releases, and while they are providing some small amount of happiness, they’re not quite hitting the mark.
April (Sofia Carson) is a struggling Broadway dancer. When she steals a cab from an older woman (in the rain), she doesn’t realize she unwittingly just made a career ending mistake as the woman is one of the biggest financers on Broadway. After a video of April accidentally pushing the woman into an orchestra pit goes viral, she is left without a job, an agent, and a career. So she goes back to her tiny hometown in Wisconsin and promptly runs into her former dance teacher (Donna Lynn Champlin). The teacher tries to get her to come teach a class or work with their new competition team, but April is a spoiled brat so she says no. Until she finds out the finals of the competition include a teacher showcase and one of the judges is a big Broadway guy. She then decides to whip the class full of kids just looking for some fun into a fierce competition team. April is god awful to the point of being borderline abusive, but of course, with a little help from her old teacher and her old boyfriend (Wolfgang Novogratz) and her caring dad (Enrico Colantoni) and the sweet group of kids, she figures it all out and they all live happily ever after.
Alright. Is this movie any good? No. Is the script well-written? No. Is the acting believable? Mostly no. Did I cry during the performance of their final number? Yes.
Look, I’m a sucker for a bad dance movie and I just can’t help it. I make no apologies for this totally weird personality quirk. There were some things I genuinely enjoyed about the movie, most of them involving the kids. One of the girls on the team is hard of hearing, a couple of them are not your typical dancer body type, one is a tomboy. The son of the football coach joins the team and his dad never wavers in his support. I liked seeing a more inclusive idea of what a competitive dance team could look like. I liked that in the end (spoiler alert), April took a job on Broadway and didn’t stay in the tiny town for the sake of her rekindled relationship with the old boyfriend. There were some good choices.
There was also a lot of terrible dialogue and some pretty meh performances. It’s hard to say whether the performances were lacking solely because of the script or if it all just went bad together, but there were some pretty cringey/eye rolly moments. But if you can make it through those (when things got emotionally “heavy” I turned to Twitter for a brief respite), then in the end, you have a somewhat heartwarming tale of a reformed bitchy dance teacher and the kids who ending up teaching her the greatest lesson of all. Boom. How’s that for a log line?
Overall Grade: C
