User Reviews

Dancing awesome. Drama and acting not so much.

There is a "bad guy" in the movie that one of the main characters owes a bunch of money to. The whole movie leads to that dilema. Somehow Steve Harvey settles that issue and now the movie is back on track to dancing. ????? What?? That is the main thing that dropped this movie's rating. It wasted 30minutes of the viewer's time. They could have kept it so there was the usual beef between the dance crews. The big, scary, hinted at drug lord was not necessary.

Like the America's Cup, the best B-Boy artists are foreigners. Oh the humiliation! Dante (Laz Alonso) enlists Blake (Josh Holloway) a washed up basketball coach to run the team because Walter Matthau and Burgess Meredith are dead and Tom Hanks is too expensive. Dante laments as he entices Blake, "How long before hip-hop isn't cool?" Clearly this film isn't for me because I never thought hip-hop was cool in the first place.

Blake assembles a new group and places them in a boot camp atmosphere to build team work. We really need to punch the next person who says "There is no "I" in team." The group must overcome the expected internal conflict which bored me to tears. Caity Lotz plays Stacy, a late coming choreographer, supplies the film with token eye candy as she reads her two lines or so.

Parental Guide: I didn't recall any F-bombs, I won't say they aren't there. No sex or nudity. Some minor self crotch grabbing.

OK Benson so being a former b-boy myself and a lover of film I decided to check out your movie. I was a big fan of your documentary Planet B- boy and I watched it in theaters and bought it on DVD. I showed it to all my friends to introduce them to b-boying and I went into this movie with high hopes. Sadly Benson you let me down. This movie fails not because of the story, which is crap but its typical dance movie fare so I do not blame you for that. No one goes to see kung fu movies for the story they are there for the fighting and the same can be said for dance movies. Sure there were a few things in the script that where a bit insulting, you made all the b-boys act like children fighting over girls and oohing and awing over a women choreographer. If these guys were teenagers it would make sense, but they are grown men and I would hope they wouldn't act like that in real life. However the real failings lye with the dance scenes. I don't know what you did Benson but I was in Montipellier for Battle of the year back in 2011 when you guys filmed this movie and what I saw live was 50 times better than what you put on screen. You needed to hire a new editor first of all. Whenever you had dancing on screen you seemed more focused on showing the crowd, the reactions of the b-boys and the other main characters than on the dancing itself. It was so choppy and jumpy that by the time it went back the dancing I got so disoriented I could not tell what was going on (It amounted to dance shaky cam and as a movie fan you know the world wide audience has lost interest in that even in action movies). If you have been reading b-boy message boards you ought to know that for years we have been complaining about live b- boy feeds of events because they do the exact same thing as your movie does, not focus on the dance. You did the same thing in planet b-boy but I simply saw that as you having to cram in 5, 6 min performances and 2, 20 min battles into an hour and half documentary. It seemed you were trying to use the editing to move the audience instead of letting the dance do it on its own. Also I did not understand why you felt it necessary to have two hosts commentating over the last battles and basically telling us "hey this is cool", did you feel the audience wouldn't understand that an air flair looked cool? I know you probably needed to get a lot of difference sponsors to get this movie made so I will not call you out on the product placement because I understand. But having someone from MTV tell the audience how they should be reacting is just plain dumb, I didn't see any commentators in You Got Served, they just showed the final dance. Speaking of the final dance that's where I gave up completely on your movie. The battle I saw in France was amazing, it was the first time I had seen a mock movie battle that felt like a real battle. You also did the battle to Big Daddy Kane's – Wrath of Kane which wasn't in the movie! If you couldn't get the rights to the song fine, they why not get another song, heck you used The Roots – Boom in one of the scenes why not save that for the final battle. Instead what we got was some generic orchestral score and so you could not see the b-boys actually dancing to song or hitting beats. We just got a generic who can do the cooler moves which ended in a flipping battle?.................Lame, for all the talk in the movie that this is an art form and a dance the general audience comes out of the movie going "I like the part when they did those back flips and when that Korean guy put his leg behind his head" instead of saying "wow I really liked it when rebel (casper) hit those beats" WHICH HE DID IN THE REAL BATTLE. Maybe you do love b-boying Benson but your movie does not show that. It shows a disinterred direction more focused telling the audience that they should find this cool rather than just showing the dance as is and having them either accepting it or not. I look forward to your next movie, a time period highschool drama in Korea about kids in the 80's might be more what you're suited for. I know I won't get your frenetic editing for one thing at least. You have my money for your next movie and you are a much more successful person than I will ever be, but I simply could not sit here and not say anything about your movie. Nothing but the best for your future, Luka (B-Boy Architect)

SPOILERS!

To be honest the only reason I watched this movie was for the delightful Josh Peck. He is such a great actor. Great comedic timing but he can also do drama as shown in "The Wackness". But I was VERY disappointed when I saw that abusive Chris Brown pop up!

Wow I could feel the fear in the female actress that was hired to work with these guys. Chris Brown's character kept making advances and so on. Disgusting. Stop rewarding his bad behaviour! He raised his hand to a woman! He violated all kinds of laws and is probably in jail/rehab/picking up trash/committing more crimes right now.

Not only did he ruin the movie, and any good morals this society has left in it, but he took ANY suspense out of the movie all while overacting. When they were picking the members of the final 'crew' he was worried he was not going to get picked. WHAT!? He is a famous (sadly) person, why would they only have him in a couple scenes. OF COURSE they are going to pick him. Therefore having him get picked last to build 'suspense' made no sense. As per his unfortunate fame we already knew he would get picked.

Also horrible racial stereotypes abound in this movie. As if ppl are defined by their race! Very backwards thinking. Your race does not define you, your ACTIONS do. So sick of this racist crap.

The movie basically turns out exactly the way you assume it will. Very boring. Worst of all the dancing was crap. Most of the moves are unoriginal and did not deserve the uproarious applause they got. And there is a conflict in the movie that makes no sense other than to further the plot.

Avoid this movie and don't support Chris Brown and/or any project he works on. To do so would be to condone his abusive behaviours.

There are three key factors to every dance movie: the dancers, the choreography, and the music. They don't all have to be fantastic to make a great movie. If two of them are exception the third isn't as important. In this movie the dancers seemed like they had potential, but didn't show any results. The choreography seemed good at first, but ended up being more of a flop. So, the last hope was the music. Yeah, it failed. Overall this movie had great potential to be great, but it was SO focused on the STORY and NOT the DANCING that it basically ruined the whole experience.

I have some suggestions for the future. DON'T throw out your ace without a really good follow up. Not only did you lose your ace, but you lost the game. Seriously? Did you think that would excite people? It was like watching failure over and over again. Its simple people enjoy hope. You just crushed it like in so many ways in this film I lost count and didn't even give a glimmer of it till like the very end and by then it was so dead there was no resurrecting it. Don't focus on the story. This is a DANCE movie. Put in some really nice dance scenes. Not just these super-fast back and forth snippets of WHAT? Also, the music. It's supposed to drive the scene. Not be background noise. DRIVE a scene. Music has the power to move people's hearts. Use it to your advantage. Especially in all out dance scenes. You waiting WAY too long to switch songs and mix it up. The worst I have to say was that orchestrated song. Not because of the genre, but because you didn't fully put it to use. You really didn't draw it out then rev it up like BAM in your face. It was more like oh, elevator music. Oh the elevator music got a little louder how nice. I hope if you do work on another dance movie it'll go a little more smoothly than this one. Good luck.

I just watched this movie on TV....wow, was it terrible. With the recent popularity of shows like ABDC and break out star groups like the Jabawakeez you would think the people that made this film could produce something decent to good. This film is chalk full of absolutely terrible acting, extremely bad music and bad dance scenes. They use the same scene over and over in the dance sequences which makes the movie look very cheap. It's extremely cheesy, and obviously caters to young teenagerS which is lame. What's up with the guys pointing over and over in the final dance scene? What are they pointing at?? Extremely annoying and very cheesy. This is by far one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Absolute garbage. Stay away from this one.

I'm not sure why I gave this a 3 star, I guess it's pity. *spoilers*The people who rated this a 10 must be the paid sponsors or they are smoking something because you would have to be high to have found anything good about this movie. First off the music absolutely sucked, there were no fresh hot hip hop songs, the final battle had some weird, like someone else said, elevator music. In other dance movies, I would want to get up and dance because of the great music, I would try to find the music list so I could buy the songs for my own play list...but not in this movie. Second, way too much camera shots were of other things except dance! It's supposed to be a dance movie, I don't want to see announcers 'talking' about the dance routines, SHOW THEM! Third, the acting was horrendous, I wanted Chris Brown to break a leg or neck and get off the screen after only a few minutes of his character being introduced. There is so much more issues but I will stop here. If you are looking for a good dance movie, skip this one. If you want to waste hours from your life, then rent this boring and poor excuse for a dance movie.

In a nutshell a breakdancing movie where 95% of the dancers are white and producers HAD to sprinkle in a few black dancers to try to make it look better(fail) so once again the creators of an art were excluded. The only believable thing in this movie is the Koreans winning the battle. Because yes Asians are amazing at B boying. There are dancers of every nationality that are amazing, but black and latino boys in New York started this thing but every single HIP HOP (hence the word hip hop) movie forgets. Oh and big slap in the face that the one black guy gets hurt and couldn't do the big finish. Thanks Hollywood.