One and Only

It is a fabulous movie. I came out of Cineworld in Dublin tonight with a big smile on my face and feeling more energised than I have in years. There are 3 main dance battles but the final one is out of this world. The story zips along throughout, is very easy to follow with subtitling and there are plenty of laughs along the way. Huang Bo is brilliant and Yibo is excellent as the humble Chen Shuo but so handsome! The camera work could be steadier for some of the dancing but was fine for the most important parts and the whole thing was just so well put together, it lit up the evening. Great work, and it was nice to recognise Street Dance China faces too!!

Only And Only is a light comedy with breakdance as the theme.

Breakdancing is a new event in Asian Games this year and also the coming up Paris 2024 Olympics. Almost the whole Chinese national team and multiple famous world street dance champions are in the final competition in the last part of the movie. I think just the appearance of these professionals already worth a movie ticket.

The final competition at the end of the movie is definitely what audience talks about the most. At times, I did feel a bit dizzy by the moves of the dancers. To me, breaking does resemble gymnastics, but the moves are much faster. There are a lot of jaw-dropping moments during the final competition scenes and I could feel my body temperature rising. Theaters need to turn up the air conditioning for the audience LOL.

You know Chen is gonna win, you know he' s gonna suffer a lot, going thru ups and downs. Under the pace control and style combination, Re Lie delivers an extraordinarily smooth feeling from start to finish. Dong Chengpeng, a comedian-to-director who have brought out several box office hits which are phenomenal yet differ in themes, has proven himself to be one of the most promising directorial newcomers in Mainland China. Audiences follow the way the story goes, laugh and cry, over and over again. In the end, they find themselves not only witnessing the growth and rebirth of a character, but also the unsurrendered souls inside themselves. A must-see for street dance lovers, and still there's more in Re Lie-even for people who aren't.

"Ding Lei" (Bo Huang) is a veteran boss of the E-Mark street dancing team. His renowned lead dancer "Kevin" (Casper Chu) is a bit of a prima-donna and so when he alights on "Chen Shuo" (Wang Yibo) who is an hard working family lad to come along and help at the practice sessions then divisions soon appear and the battle lines are drawn for the ultimate in dancing challenges at the national championships. The story here is not great - nor, indeed as is the acting nor the writing. What is captivating, though, is the gravity-defying acrobatics as these guys spin, pivot and fly through the air with astonishing skill and dexterity. It's also illustrative of just how this art serves as an aspirational conduit for young men who have little by way of opportunity to escape from the mundanity of their day-to-day lives. Personally, I find Yibo Wang just bit too weedy as an actor - he's actually always a bit of a drip - but essentially this is a triumph for the choreographers art and the adroitness and spontaneity of the dancers that really delivers excitingly for the last twenty minutes.

I don't know much about street dance, but I can still empathize with the dancers in the movie because they are also a group of ordinary people. Watch this film, you will be affected by the passion in the dancers' hearts, and remember the dreams we gave up before. At the same time, the film will also tell you that sometimes failure is not because you are not good enough, it is OK to fail. There are too many ways to interpret this film, the director is clever, he let every ordinary person can find their own emotional projection area in the film, all the laughter, tears and even the burning point, are so natural, without a trace of deliberate, even the last tear has not ended, the next laugh point comes one after another, directly hit the heart.