"Take The Lead" - Formulaic but fun
Category: Movies...
Posted Saturday, April 08, 2006 at 10:45 AM [GMT-6]

Take The Lead is predictable, preachy, clichéd, disjointed, and illogical, with one-dimensional stereotypical characters...and it's a lot of fun to watch if you go in with the right expectations.

This movie about one man's efforts to use ballroom dancing to rehabilitate a group of inner city kids who've been written off by The System is essentially a remake of a much better film, the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. The latter movie focused on fifth-grade students preparing for New York City's annual ballroom competition via the American Ballroom Theater's "Dancing Classrooms" curriculum, while Take The Lead is about kids in high school. The older age group introduces a whole different set of dynamics, most of them hormone-driven.

Take The Lead is, in fact, supposed to be the story of how the ABT program began, with Antonio Banderas portraying Pierre Dulaine, the founder of the program (Dulaine makes a brief cameo in the movie; if you've seen Mad Hot Ballroom, you'll spot him in the film's finale). Unfortunately, the "updating" of the story doesn't improve it at all, and the attempt to blend traditional ballroom music with hip-hop in order to make it more culturally acceptable to the iPod generation is pretty lame.

Nevertheless, the dance scenes and the individual portrayals and, yes, even the music make this a very watchable movie...especially for people like us who have only recently discovered ballroom dancing. When viewed as a whole, the movie falls well short of brilliance, but there are enough excellent bits and pieces to redeem it quite nicely.

Take The Lead is rated PG-13 primarily for language. No F-words, but pretty much everything else, so you might want to take that into consideration when deciding if your kids can see it.

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Technorati tags: Take The Lead | Mad Hot Ballroom