Sunday, 5 May 2013

All Stars (2013, Dir. Ben Gregor, UK) (Cert: U/TBC) ***


Starring: Theo Stephenson, Akai Osei-Mansfield, Fleur Houdijk

 

A local youth club is shutting down to make way for a car park but Jaden (Osei-Mansfield) has a plan to keep the youth club going; by holding a show where local children can showcase their talents. Jaden’s a talented street-dancer but is told to focus on his studies. Meanwhile, Ethan (Stevenson) hoping to impress a girl (Hanae Atkins) challenges a group of dancers to a competition despite not knowing how to dance so he and Jaden form a group to perform at the talent competition.

 

All Stars isn’t exactly a film that’s likely to hit the big time; dance films (that is films that feature extensive dance sequences, much like how musicals use songs), have historically a rather poor reputation and given that this is a very, VERY British film, there’s not much hope for this film overseas. This film isn’t revolutionary in its field. It delivers pretty much exactly what is expected, but it does it in a fairly competent manner. The characters are fairly one-dimensional and the story is pretty poor (personally, I’m sick of the tired old “let’s put on a show to save this building” plot that’s been done so many times and is really lazy writing) however, the film does deliver something in the way of some pretty impressive dance numbers on a conceptual level and even though the film is full of appearances by familiar faces (at least in the UK), it never comes across as gratuitous (in fact, it rather underuses John Barrowman). Should you expect something special? No, and that is a disappointment, but there’s nothing truly terrible about this film either.

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