Honey 2
How many dance movies are there going to be before its target audience yawns itself into a coma? Honey 2 is the sequel (of sorts, although it has very little to do with its predecessor) to 2003’s Jessica Alba Dance ‘em up Honey.
How many dance movies are there going to be before its
target audience yawns itself into a coma?
Honey 2 is the sequel (of sorts,
although it has very little to do with its predecessor) to 2003’s Jessica Alba
Dance ‘em up Honey.
It stars Katerina Graham as Maria, a dancer recently
released from juvie who’s assigned a job as a caretaker for the Honey Daniels
training school and taken under the wing of Honey’s mother (Lonette McKee – the
only tenuous link to the first movie).
Despite trying to stay on the straight and narrow, she’s constantly
tempted by her sleazy ex-boyfriend Luis, who was responsible for her
incarceration in the first place.
He wants her to rejoin his dance crew, current kings of the
neighbourhood, the 718 Crew.
She rejects his advances and instead opts to join the clean-cut
High Def Crew who are coincidentally rehearsing in the very studio she’s
caretaking. They include squeaky
clean college boy (hilariously double majoring in Dance/Business studies),
Brandon (Randy Wayne) straight talking Lyric (Brittany Perry-Russell) and her
confrontational sister Tina (Seychelle Gabriel) and the sassy Carla (Melissa
Molinaro).
They’re looking for a new choreographer and lead dancer to
perfect their moves for an upcoming reality TV dance competition whose reigning
champions are, shock of shocks, the 718!
But will Maria have what it takes to face down her old crew and steer
High Def to victory?
Graham makes for a decent lead and proves that Jessica Alba
isn’t the only one that can flaunt her abs in a black halter top. She’s ably supported by Seychelle
Gabriel as turncoat Tina and Christopher “War” Martinez is suitably slimy as
over-confident scumbag Luis.
The dance battles for the most part are energetic and
well-choreographed but there’s nothing that hasn’t been seen in half a dozen
movies of the same genre – you could slip in a dance montage from another movie
and it would probably go past without comment.
Honey 2 really has no
ambitions beyond those sequences – the plot often feels like a few tiresome
links to the next dance. That’s a
shame because its opening sequence – a dance-off in a women’s prison – promised
a more knowing nod to the inherent ridiculousness of the genre and it would
have been vastly improved if it didn’t then try to take itself too seriously.
Honey 2 could take
home gold in the Cliché Olympics with attempts at dialogue often resulting in unintentional
hilarity. Tina and Lyric are dancing not just because of the prestige but because
the prize would go to fund “grandma’s medical expenses”; Brandon comes from a
filthy rich background and is dancing to defy his authoritarian father and it’s
impossible not to laugh when Maria unexpectedly drops in the line “My parents
died in a car crash”.
What’s next, Carla needs to win the contest so she can be
the world’s first dancing astronaut?
Despite it being yet another unimaginative addition to the
over-saturated dance movie genre, its target audience will most likely be
satisfied. The rest of us…bleh.
