Honey 3: Dare to Dance Movie Review

Honey 3: Dare to Dance (2016)

Rent Honey 3 on Amazon Video
Written by: Catherine Cyran (script by), Catherine Cyran
Directed by: Bille Woodruff
Starring: Cassie Ventura, Kenny Wormald, Dena Kaplan, Sibongile Mlambo
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer

Plot
While attending college in Cape Town, Melea Martin loses her scholarship and must find money to pay for the rest of her semester. Searching for a way to honor her recently deceased mother and inspire the community, she stages a hip hop rendition of Romeo and Juliet.

Verdict
It's telling a story about someone telling a story of Romeo and Juliet assuming we aren't familiar with the play. What makes this movie work is that we already know the story and don't need to interpret it from the dance. That also makes this movie boring. The entire story is predictable two minutes in. Every plot point is hackneyed. Choreographed dance is impressive, but there's just so much of it in this movie.
Skip it.

Review
This starts at a street racing scene with break dancers. I don't know what subset of the population does both. I really was hoping this would be The Fast and the Furious but with dancing. I like the concept. A cop has to infiltrate an illegal underground dance off competition. Unfortunately that isn't this movie.

The dancing is impressive, but in this world everyone dances. Along every street, in every  building, even street gangs... they all dance. If I was driving down the street in this town, I'd think the dancing plague hit. The Dancing Plague of 1518 is a real thing. Four-hundred people danced for weeks without stopping in France. People died of exhaustion and heart attacks. The prevailing theory is that toxic fungi similar to LSD formed on the town's grain supply.

Melea wants to retell Romeo and Juliet with hip hop dance as her thesis. She claims this story has never been told like that, but it probably has. That's what helps and hurts this movie. The viewer easily gets what is happening even if the dance doesn't do a good job of conveying the story, but that also makes this boring. Do a hip hop Henry V.




The script leaves a lot to be desired. Melea loses her scholarship in the middle of the semester but vows to stage her thesis anyway. She casts herself as the lead, finds a venue, and many willing volunteers. Her boyfriend is jealous of the pop star that wants to help the show. Apparently all the dancers are doing this for fun and love of dance. Even her dance off enemy agrees to help.

At one point Melea sits the cast down to tell them the story of Romeo and Juliet because no one has ever heard that story.

In this movie choreography is getting a song and immediately performing an in sync dance with a partner. There is no practice, no struggling to get it right. From the start the dancers are in sync.

What would help the pacing is taking a page from other sports movies. Have a competition or event in the middle, something to showcase the dancing of this movie instead of making us wait until the end. By the time we've see parts of the penultimate show many times. The only difference at the end is costumes.
A competition in the middle where they fail could be a great motivator as well, adding tension.

The only thing that could make this movie more predictable is if an outline was displayed on the screen at the beginning of the movie.
This movie can only relay a stage production we already know well. Telling a new story, and actually being forced to have the dance communicate information could have helped this movie.