Two cross-town rival dance teams go head to head for the National Nationals Championship.
Director: Alex Di Marco
Stars: Shane Harper, Kathryn McCormick, Finola Hughes.
Stacey Tookey ... choreography
Watched on AmazonPrime.
No songs in the Soundtracks; plenty onscreen.
Deeply mediocre dancing/choreography. Small-time dance contest, nowhere near National scope. The naming of the competition "National Nationals" is an accurate indication of the creativity employed to create this film.
The plot might be ok if the acting were. The 2 adult leads, FH and another, are playing this as camp; the rest are more sincere. It's a tacky mix.
I fell asleep at least 3 times and had to restart, so I saw the final dances thrice. They are so bad that they were filmed in 2 settings: the competition stage, and some imagined location. Yeah, that distracted me from the quality.
SH (b. '93) is a generalist dancer: tries to be G.Kelly and Twitch, succeeds at neither. He has no tricks of his own, no precision at anything, no particular style or grace. Don't know if that's the character he's playing or his own limitations. I suspect it's the choreography and/or lack of rehearsal, because he has a lot of dance credits in his C.V, including "principal dancer" in HS Musical 2 ('07).
KM was the lead in Step Up Revolution ('12), where I commented "KM has something different in the way she moves, perhaps because all the choreographers were male. By different, I don't necessarily mean better." Looks like she was a contestant on So You Think You Can Dance ('09-'10), was on the "Top 3 Perform" episode but not the next one, and was brought back in subsequent years as an All-Star.
No need to revisit this one.
Rated 4.8 (705)
indie, dir. Di Marco; 5
