Hilariously, spectacularly, cringingly bad

Rating: Null/10 (2 January 2002)

Warning : contains spoilers, and damning criticism.
Save the Last Dance had me Save Up my Best Cusswords until I could leave the cinema and scream, partly with laughter and partly with shellshocked disbelief about how bad the film was.
First of all : the plot. A white girl (Julia Stiles) and a black man (Sean Patrick Thomas) develop a relationship. Why does this have to be such an issue? Sure, it's not one that's tackled in cinema very often, but due to a good reason: it's not interesting enough to hold up a film for 110 minutes, unless the acting is superb and the metaphorical/symbolic play is also well integrated. I bet you can guess how well Save the Last Dance accomplishes this. The story is so cliched that I found myself hedging predictions every quarter hour and smiling when they came up. Okay - so Sara has a big dance contest coming up. Oh my! She has suddenly split with her boyfriend the night before. Will she dance badly for the first half, and then will her boyfriend show up and transform the performance to an Olympic gold for the second half? Imagine an entire film full of this standard of storytelling direness and you're coming close.
The acting is about as good as it could be for two B-listers who look as though they are embarrassed to be there and are trying to secure their next role between takes. There is no heartfelt interaction between the leads, and incidentally, doesn't Sean Patrick Thomas look about five years too old for the role?
The moral of the film is cringingly condascending. It seems to be: Drugs are bad kids so don't take drugs, and gangs are bad kids so don't be in gangs. If you want to see a film that actually says something intelligent about a difficult issue watch Traffic. I am reminded of another film which tried to take on this entire black/white/gangs/drugs issue, Dangerous Minds, which also was an unwatchable disaster.
The characters are unintentionally racist. The black characters are Derek, with his criminal background, and his buddy Malakai who wears a big puffy jacket, backwards baseball cap and excessive jewellery, and drives round the 'hood fighting turf wars and pulling off drivebys. Why don't they just call the character Negro Jim and have him live in a wooden shack in Alabama, playing his banjo on the porch and shouting "Woman! Where's ma fried chicken." I'm sorry, but racial stereotyping to this degree is unacceptable in such a modern film. Did anybody else actually feel insulted?

What had me rolling in the aisles with laughter was the final dance scene at the end, where Sara is trying to get into some academy or other. The sequence goes on for a good five minutes and yet is entirely composed of around three hundred tiny, tiny clips about a half second long. Usually they show one arm movement, one leg movement, perhaps a half twirl, etc. I soon realised why it was filmed in this bizarre way - the actress, Julia Stiles, obviously could not dance for toffee (WHY CHOOSE HER FOR A FILM ABOUT DANCING?) and so they had to film the entire sequence in carefully coached one-second takes and laboriously edit it all together so it would play in time to the music. It all gives one flat, unemotive, lacklustre dance routine. May I remind you that the dance sequences were supposed to be the selling point of this film.
The other selling point is meant to be the soundtrack. I'm not going to quote the entire 'Why You Shouldn't Have Contemporary Hits In Films' macro but I will ask this: When was the last time a chart hit enhanced a film? I like to keep my music and my film separate. I also like to keep my face and my vomit bag separate, which is why I give this film two stars out of ten (at least it's short) and give it my Least Recommended Film of 2000 trophy.