Nerding Day: Battle of the Year (Patreon)

Want to be like me? Obviously not. Dire mistake, really. But there are memes about Vin Diesel. Want to be like him? Breakdance. Common? Michael Fassbender? Breakdance. El-P? Terry Crews? Chris Brown? Wait, hold the fucking phone.

They didn’t. They wouldn’t.

And yet it spins.

Dance films follow a boom-bust cycle. Battle of the Year didn’t start a boom. It had plenty going for it: elite dancers. Good catering. A cool logo. Footage pasted from the contest. But the script flatlines, and Chris Brown plays a plucky underdog. While his cult’s big enough to find new prey, it couldn’t save global sales.

Well, Chris has fought for a while. This could predate his first arrest, or fall after our attention spans died.

Someone fucked up bad.

You may have a forgiving or draconian stance on redemption. It doesn’t matter. Breezy ripped off Stanley Kowalski while this was written. And shot. And edited. At each stage of Battle of the Year’s creation, Chris Brown kept TMZ alive. The man’s conditioning was all one-way boxing. You forgive someone’s past, not the sounds from their trailer between takes.

Luckily, he splits protagonist duties. While Chris dances and makes you uncomfortable, Josh Holloway eats screentime without dancing at all. He plays a basketball coach hired to run a dance team for reasons lost to earlier drafts.

It’s not his fault. The entire cast is dancers that can’t act, actors that can’t dance, and Chris Brown. Battle of the Year made the flashiest dance in the world unwatchable. It’s a solar eclipse-level miracle, and just as fun to look at.

Today, I’m flipping my formula. We’re focusing on the best part. A scene spared everything that sinks Battle of the Year like a Boeing cruise ship. That should make this article nice and constructive. My signature.

Battle of the Year peaks with a performance at Battle of the Year. This genre isn’t complicated. The other team just danced good, so our heroes have to dance real good, or they lose at dancing. These three light, sane, stably shot minutes don’t represent the film.

The choreo? Slick. This dance flick scene highlights dancing. A fine strategy.

Dancing to music, without trickshot montage cuts. Battle of the Year likes putting random moves over newsreel muzak. If dance were about sequence or rhythm, that would suck. It’d be like porn in inflatable sumo suits.

Battle of the Year mostly takes another tack. There’s a story in its heart. One like Remember the Titans, without desegregation. Or The Mighty Ducks, without heart. Or Rocky, without anything that made his loss satisfying. Unplot gets much, much more time than headspins.

In fact, even in this scene, constant reaction shots tend to

ruin any

you get it.

It starts with a crisis. America’s getting smoked, annually, in one dance contest. Not Red Bull BC One, which we fund and win often. But Battle of the Year, which isn’t run by a US corporation. Dante, a millionaire money owner played by Mother’s Milk, laments the sad state of free backflips:

I’m with Dante. How’s South Korea keep winning stuff they put more time, blood, and talent into? America’s tried nandrolone and confidence, and they only work everywhere else. We invented breaking. That’s like losing every skateboarding medal to Japan, or Brazil, or Japan again. Congress wouldn’t stand for it.

His solution’s simple: an All-Star Team. Dante’s spraying hip-hop with money until it speaks American. If you thought cheering for the home team in Rambo III was hard, wait until you meet the Dream Team. Starring an arrogant dickhead, a violent loose cannon, a glass ego, and Chris Brown.

While this monologue’s stiff, the dialogue makes it sound like prime Lupe Fiasco. Take Dante’s description of his best friend, who dances for zero seconds:

Rant about white saviors if you’re in the mood. I just know they wanted the pun. Needed it. It’s the best character tag they’ve got. Battle of the Year’s arc is dragged behind this exchange like a mob sedan.

Then there’s Dante’s response to said widower choosing gin over coaching the Yankees:

That’s right. You either dance yourself rich, or chug to poverty.

A true olympic sprint of cliches. Some think we yearn for tyranny. Others say death. I think we yearn for mechanical replacement. Not really, but the joke fits the flow. And Battle of the Year taught me that flow

matters.

An imaginary opponent might say “it’s a dumb dance movie.” That’s the problem. Battle of the Year is mostly lego pathos, Chris Brown quips, and the national anthem. There’s no room for the dumb dance movie. The first hour has two intact dance battles. Two. That’s like Bring It On spending an hour spelling “go.”

The camera has other priorities.

The good scene peaks with a blindfolded stunt set. Now, you can fake this. With breaking’s mix of talent, ego, and constant injury, I don’t think they did. And if they did, they got me. They danced good until I bought in.

It’s a long road there.

Chris Brown plays Rooster (bboys like flashy nicknames. Think Batman, Lady Gaga, or D-Day). To casting’s credit, Rooster’s an insecure instigator dragging the entire team down. To their shame, he’s the emotional center. If you don’t want the best for Chris Brown, you won’t enjoy Battle of the Year.

There’s a smaller problem: Chris doesn’t break much. He poses and flips, but that’s not breaking.

No, really.

There’s more to it.

Bboying is more than choreo with gymnastics, and metal is more than screaming about Satan.

Whatever, nerds. It matters because Rooster’s framed as America’s best bboy. We’re on Hulk Hogan logic, which makes Rooster the best bboy in the world. And he barely breaks. Chris might as well play a couple’s therapist.

In any case, here’s a genre secret: dance flicks work like karate flicks. You can dick up almost everything if the leads move well. Or everything. Millions watched Save the Last Dance and said “deep” without sarcasm. You Got Served was a series of strokes punctuated by music videos. You just have dick up quietly. It’s hard to suck harder than Tony Jaa kicks. Right now, Battle of the Year is dangerously close.

The good scene shows off what the dumbass script calls “the five elements of death.” Per Rooster: footwork, style, power, originality, and soul. The difference between style, originality, and soul? Hell if I know, I lost a lot of battles. But the scene also shouts out the five elements of hip-hop, which are tangible, separate concepts. And says breaking’s alive, and not for sale. Unless you’re Sony, Battle of the Year’s distributor. Then it’s a fire sale.

Now, I’m not writing on a powerhouse VAIO SX14, so my art suffers. Decent photoshop needs a custom-tuned Intel® Core™ i7-1360P processor. But if I had the peerless visual fidelity of an FHD IPS Display, with touch options for on-the-fly speech bubble adjustment, I’d be free enough to notice a little product placement.

Honestly, forgivable drizzled across a whole film. Nonsense isn’t free. Nor a dancer’s time, in the beautiful world of theory. But Battle of the Year crammed all the product placement into one scene, like someone forgot until reshoots.

The Dream Team hits their Friday Night Lights low point six or seven times. The fourth time, Coach Whiskey tries positive reinforcement. To their bank accounts.

Their reward for spreading democracy with air flares? Sony products. They treat these care packages with the glee and care reserved for organ transplants. And who can blame them? It’s about

time something went Breezy’s way.

Check out the Good Scene snapshots so far. Anyone missing?

Rooster flees the movie two-thirds through, and I hope it was planned. It’s Battle of the Year’s best joke, intentional or otherwise. There’s failed pathos too, but that’s part of the formula.

The fun starts with an appearance from K-mel, and everything else screeching to a halt. Here’s a HotDog-friendly (wrestling) stretched metaphor (promo): think of when an older performer (immortal superstar) hijacks RAW (inspires young talent). That’s this Boogie Brats cameo, which I’d love in a movie an hour shorter.

Inspired, Rooster decides to show off a routine. He calls it a commando because he’s an authentic bboy that uses authentic bboy slang, and authentically confuses the audience. You wish he’d break an authentic leg. Instead you get a fulltwist.

But it’s not a normal fulltwist. It’s aerial karma.

Rooster breaks his dancing gland, days before the plot. And, you might notice, before the most breaking-intensive scene. I’ve been hard on this movie, but I’d call this a second Good Scene.

Thus, in his own way, Chris brings something to Battle of the Year. Until we’re asked to pity him, and transfer our Chris-love to the rest of The Dream Team. Then he takes a lot away from Battle of the Year. Like a pair of lead Gazelles. Or a judge.

The Good Scene isn’t the climax. The final battle returns to random moves over random music, because this life is a test. It’s a crew battle against The Koreans, and that’s not my emphasis. That’s how every actor says it.

Our basic plot’s saving hip-hop from foreigners. But it’s mostly one country. Dante fears The Koreans more than their radioactive neighbor. Coach Jagermeister channels someone else’s wartime trauma. Panicked dancers whisper The Koreans instead of developing characters. The intonation of The Koreans is somewhere between “The Decepticons” and “it’s terminal.”

They have a name: Seoul Assassins. But that’s a second-draft addition, and ctrl+f is for arthouse nerds. The Koreans in Battle of the Year are a lawsuit-proof blend of three or so real crews (Jinjo/Gamblerz/Fusion MC, if you want a YouTube hole), which kind of shits on the supergroup angle. The Koreans are independent artists, and our heroes are a corporate buyout built around Chris Brown.

Very American. Well done.

The Koreans serve as de-facto final boss, despite Russia beating the Dream Team halfway through the movie. So, you know, you’d think the climax would be…fuck it. Fear the Koreans.

If this sounds like sour grapes, or a backspin skill issue: you’re a traitor. Hand in your Denny’s loyalty card, and report to your nearest Freedom Center for deployment in Tehran.

The Good Scene shows more restraint. The jingoism’s contained to a French audience jeering at the Dream Team for being American. And trying to buy breaking. And starting a fistfight the night before. Coach Cirrhosis almost got mad at them for the last thing, before remembering the flag. He pats his boxing team on the back and sends them to war.

They hate our freedom.

I was wrong: at this speed, keep Rooster in the plot. Put Chris Brown in an Uncle Sam tracksuit. Choreograph to a mashup of “Over There” and “Look At Me Now.” Modern wrestling sprang from naming a few American villains after guns. Movies aren’t smarter than wrestling.

Then again, the half-measure’s enough. The Dream Team qualifies, defeating the faceless foreign horde. And beats Russia offscreen, because Hollywood’s Cold War never ends. Today’s mirror to action movies includes patriotism glazing everything like sugar.

Then reality ensues. The Koreans clinch the finals by one point. Freedom loses. Not just in the film: America hasn’t won Battle of the Year in the 21st century. It’s Olympic basketball, backwards. And if you think we’ll do better with gold medals involved, 행운을 빈다 버거 중독자.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: James Boyd aka Kid USA, inventor of the Patriot Dive, a dangerous headplant banned in every country but the free ones.

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