Style over substance, galore!

Rating: 2/10 (26 September 2017)

Style-over-substance films usually annoy me. When those movie are as bad as Flashdance, I just want to ask the people who made them what they were thinking. Actually, this was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, who are well known for making films of cinematic gloss, but nothing with real humanity. The story is so simple, the whole thing is probably 50 minutes too long. This is basically Rocky if the story has dance scenes for filler, the numerous subplots went nowhere, and the characters weren't appealing.
For a story, Jennifer Beals plays a young girl named Alex who wants to be a professional dancer, and not just to dance at a small nightclub. By day, she works as a welder at a steel mill; shocking since she is only 18. The steel mill boss's son falls in love with her and later tries to help her get into the professional dance group that she yearns to be a part of, if only she had more confidence.
Everything that I highlighted in just three sentences is everything there is to know about the main story. Everything else is just music video-inspired dancing scenes (which, unfortunately, are mostly performed by Beals's body double instead of Beals herself) set to popular 80s songs, and subplots that go nowhere or are resolved in five minutes. For one thing, Alex sees the boss's son with his previous wife, she gets mad and throws a rock at his window, but the next day, he explains why his ex-wife was with him in the first place. Later, her friend joins a sleazy strip club, and Alex forces her to leave after three minutes. There is even an old woman who is Alex's friend, and conveniently, was also a famous dancer. Not enough time is spent on the relationship they have and the film never establishes how they met.
The acting is average at best, with Beals giving the warmest performance of the whole cast, and most of the characters act like old stereotypes, such as the pathetic friend who makes useless jokes (which leads to another sub-plot that goes nowhere) and the aggressive jocks who have eyes for the main heroine. Alex herself is also the victim of the horrible screenplay. Close to the beginning of the film, she actually does come close to signing up for an audition for the dance group, but she backs out because she is afraid. Not a good enough reason? Well, the film still has an hour and fifteen minutes left, and if she did get her confidence at that moment, it would be nothing more than a short film.
I have very little to say about Flashdance because the film offers so little. I guess the dance scenes are well shot, and Beals performance makes things a little more tolerable, but everything else is quite awful. Even some of the 80s songs are poor. This is easily one of the most uninteresting pieces of nothing ever made.