Body Language

I was, admittedly, very sceptical when I first heard of this film. A Dutch film basically taking on the successful Step Up-franchise is a big challenge, especially as it will take an enormous amount of effort to persuade the sceptics who believe that it doesn't get any better than Step Up. What more can one do than create a film that is full of great music (and I dislike R&B!), loads of dancing with quite an impressive array of brilliant moves and attractive leads? Well, how about making sure that all scenes are wonderfully lit and beautifully shot and editing the film in such a way that you can immediately see that these people really are great dancers, rather than trying to fool the audience with cheap editing tricks? Even the script is better than you would expect. It wastes no time on its strange premise and doesn't try to keep us wondering if this group of misfits is going to succeed. The story lines aren't particularly original, but it's quite refreshing to see a film in which dancing is not presented as a solution to all the problems, but as a means of expressing who you are and what you feel. In the end it's not the victory that counts, but the pains, the hardships, the love and friendship you meet along the way. This isn't highbrow stuff by any means, but dance flicks really don't get any better than this.

There are a lot of things done right on this movie that gone wrong in Step Up, the number one that really shines in this movie is the friendship between the group, the hardships they have to endure and the good things too. Step Up tried hard to make a good "group" when the majority of time it came out a little forced, the last one being the worst in this matter. Body Language does not come forced in any moment, there is really a LOT of chemistry between all members of the group.

The second thing Step Up done wrong and this movie did right is the climax and the dance scenes, in Step up, the movie was slowly introducing us to the main theme with little dance scenes of good quality but giving us the best scene in the end. Body Language came out a lot more natural in the sense that movie is plagued with dance scenes and all of equally great quality, even the bad moments are plagued with artistic dancing.

The last thing is the scrip, its done before I know, but here, the movie actually care for character development and situations whenever in Step Up all situations were just "fill" content for the contest and the ending.

Simply put, this movie rocks. If you enjoyed Step Up series I AM sure you will enjoy this one. Congrats to dutch people for making one of the best dance movies I've seen, totally recommended. Oh, BTW, the music is Great too !

If you've read the storyline, you might already notice it's not a great story. From the beginning till the end the storyline is based on too many coincidences and is painfully predictable.

Wait! It gets even worse. The acting isn't sub par, it's atrocious. I couldn't get into the movie even once. Especially one crying scene, which was probably meant to be very emotional, I honestly felt ashamed instead of the actress.

You might think "So? It's a dance movie. As long as the dancing is good, I'd watch it." Think again. These are good dancers, don't get me wrong, but the editing was disappointing to say the least and the choreo was just sad. They even used computer animation on some dances. This should have made it better, but it made it so much worse.

Finally at the end of the movie I actually felt like crying myself. Wasted my time and I felt like scratching my eyes out. That's how annoying this movie was. If that was the goal of the movie, then it's brilliant, if not, it sucks balls.