You're in the Entertainment - Movies section

Wayans spoofs, like 'Dance Flick,' are wearing thin

Published online on Friday, May. 22, 2009

E-Mail Print

"Dance Flick" limps along like it has a bunion the size of a cantaloupe. Envisioned as yet another in the Wayans family dynasty's slew of slapped-together parodies, the movie has a few funny bits and characters that work, but the joke-to-belly-laugh ratio is pretty miserable compared to such past outrageous Wayans romps as the "Scary Movie" series.

(I just saw a pig fly by, and it didn't have anything to do with swine flu, but instead marks the day I actually offer mild praise for "Scary Movie." Wonders never cease.)

The big issue with "Dance Flick" is that the genre it skewers isn't really all that ripe for parody. Sure, Hollywood has pumped out a long string of dance-related movies, usually involving fresh-faced protagonists struggling against all odds to break through as professional dancers, but those films aren't either iconic or memorable enough to provide the broad, easy targets the Wayans need to make their brand of comedy work.

"Dance Flick" takes place in a gritty urban educational setting known as Musical High School. Director Damien Wayans, working with a script by five members of the Wayans clan, weaves together standard plot threads of the genre: the interracial romance (white girl falls for talented black boy when he teaches her hip-hop routines); the Juilliard dream sequence (complete with a table of three stern judges looking grim as they mark their scorecards); the dance-crew-competition motif (teams battle for a big prize).

Some of it is chuckleworthy, especially when the Wayanses toss in goofy nods and a few production numbers poking fun at "Dreamgirls," "Hairspray," "Fame," "Twilight" and "Save the Last Dance." But more often than not, the jokes are either too obvious (a Chevron truck is relabeled "Cheney," the dance establishment is named "Club Violent") or inside Hollywood (a character remarks that he thought "only the good guys get to go in slow motion.")

Then there are the jokes you've already seen in the movie's trailer, including the much-repeated image of a pregnant dancer going into labor on the dance floor, giving us perhaps the first umbilical-cord-attached performer in motion picture history. When that sequence rolled by, the audience barely chuckled, suggesting it's not wise to give away your most outrageous jokes in the TV commercial.

Finally, I don't want to sound like a comedy geneticist here, but being funny isn't always a trait that's smoothly passed from one generation to the next. "Dance Flick" marks the first starring appearance by Damon Wayans Jr., who plays the lead role opposite Shoshana Bush as his girlfriend. Wayans is pleasant enough, but he's far from the smooth comic assurance of his father.

It takes a special talent for an actor to bop along from one loose sketch to another and still hold the story line together, and the younger Wayans has a long way to go. Comedy is about surprise, and the younger Wayans comes across as someone who just got done memorizing his lines. What "Dance Flick" suggests is that at least one thing is alive and well in Hollywood: nepotism. And that isn't the name of the latest hip-hop craze.