Battlefield America (2012)

Drama, Musical /
2.5/10
31/100
7% – Critics
53% – Audience

Battlefield America Storyline

A young businessman who lands a community service sentence falls in with a group of misfit kids who need mentoring. With the help of a pro instructor, he works to get the kids ready for a big underground dance competition.

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Battlefield America Movie Reviews

A Nutshell Review: Battlefield America

Street dance films are the rage these days, and this genre probably won’t see extinction at least in this decade, with the American Step Up franchise seeing the latest installment coming here in August, and the European Streetdance films having its latest release earlier this year. All versions now boast of the use of 3D to try and jack some extra revenue from its target teenage audience looking out for inspiration to hit the dance floors, and eyebrows definitely got raised when the dancers here are, well, kids.

Not that they’re doing a bad job. I belong to the camp of those who feel a little bit awkward with children being dolled up and having their parents push them into participating in modelling or beauty pageants, and to take competition that come their way so seriously, you wonder if the lack of a proper, normal childhood will have any detrimental effects later in their lives. And here, a handful of kids no older than 12, get to move and groove in what I thought was gangsta style, some adopting the same attitude outside of the dance floor, and you’d wonder just what’s going on behind the scenes in bringing these kids up. And to my surprise too are two of the kids, one being really androgynous, and the other I thought was female until it was revealed much later to be male instead.

That aside, the dance moves if you ignore the age, are pretty OK as far as the Step Up and Streetdance standards go, minus a notch. Being kids, they don’t have the mileage chalked up in executing more fanciful sequences, the best of the best here being nothing more than a somersault flip that turned out to be the finishing move, which in the other mentioned films are nothing but a walk in the park. Clinically choreographed, it’s a pity we don’t get to see much dances by opposite parties since the preliminaries en route to the titular competition largely went by without being able to see much. Even the finals were just a one round three- cornered fight, ending with a dance off between two groups, following formula that’s established for the genre.

And the excuse of a plot got wrapped around a high flying, arrogant executive Sean Lewis (Marques Houston) who got to serve time in community service, falling in love with the beautiful supervisor at the center played by Mekia Cox, and having to develop friendship and camaraderie with a group of troubled kids there by teaching them dance. It got a little bit tired with the usual man-hating-kids to man-warming-up-to-kids and vice versa, since you’re likely to stay many steps in the way the plot develops, right down to expecting the type of challenges and road blocks that come their way. Think Dead Poets Society dumbed down by a lot, and you have what Battlefield America attempts to achieve. Even the way the kids get into trouble and the way their challengers behave, remind you of how the Karate Kid goes about dealing with adversary, right down to extrapolating that to the adult, supervisory level.

Director Chris Stokes may have seen an opportunity in adapting the modern street dance film formula for teens into something for and at the kids level, but it’s street dance we’re dealing with, that comes with a certain territory with it that’s out of reach for the underaged. That made the film suffer a little bit in having a story that’s rather generic and done ad nauseam, having to dwell in safe and feel good themes despite being a tale set in the underground dance scene, and ultimately felt something like after sitting through a moral education lesson. Still, for those involved in the world of street dance, I’m pretty sure this would just be another feather in the cap to try and be inspired by.

laughably pathetic

I remember IMDB heavily promoting this film over the week or two before its release with full-page ads loading up all over the place for this movie before you could see anything else. Obviously the production put all their resources into advertising as the final product looks hilariously cheap.

Looking for an enjoyably bad time at the movies, I saw this movie in the theater with a friend on opening night in Universal City, CA and the only other group in the theater was the family of one of the little boys who starred in the movie. I’m pretty sure a few of them left before the movie was even over.

Oh my lord was this film hilariously uninspired. It wasn’t quite at THE ROOM levels of bizarre awkwardness, but nothing in the film worked. On the plus side, I can say a lot of the kids put in some decent acting considering their inexperience, but the writer/director didn’t put much care into injecting any emotion into the proceedings. It’s as though he watched THE MIGHTY DUCKS (or any other number of underdog sports movies) and just copied the formula with inner city youth street dancing.

Technically the movie looked and sounded like a professional movie, but contained zero in the way of innovation or imagination. A real turkey.

Dance, Boys! Dance!

You really do have to wonder where certain filmmakers’ heads are at when they conceive of a movie. “Battlefield America” is the most preposterous, exploitive, cloying, artificial film of its kind since “Standing Ovation.” Written and directed by Chris Stokes, it’s essentially of the junior division of his own “You Got Served,” which is to say that it tells the story of competing dance crews made up almost entirely of children. Not only is this grossly implausible, it’s also incredibly disturbing; by replacing adult dancers with kids in the ten-to-twelve age range, Stokes has created a spectacle no less bizarre and fetishistic than a child beauty pageant. That most of them are boys instructed by male dancers only makes it even more unsettling, especially since a select few of the crew members are effeminate and dressed androgynously.

All leads to the dance competition the film takes its title from, which is held in Los Angeles at the Staples Center. During the finale, we’re made aware that some of the screaming audience members are the dancers’ parents. This begs the question: Where were these parents when their kids were performing in one of the film’s several music-video like dance sequences, all of which take place in secluded back alleys and abandoned basketball courts and are presided over by shady thug stereotypes? One also wonders if there are enough preteens in the city of Los Angeles that could believably dance in a street crew, or even comprise the sum total of the huddled spectators cheering them on. For everything Stokes tried to achieve, one of the most basic should have been an idea that was at the very least plausible.

When the film isn’t objectifying its child stars in dance routines that get increasingly difficult to tell apart, it forces us to endure a plot so manufactured and sickly sweet that it could easily be printed on the back of a Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle. We meet Sean Lewis (Marques Houston), a successful advertising executive who’s on the verge of being made one of the partners. The night he celebrates his promotion is the same night he gets pulled over and arrested for a DUI. His attorney is able to pull a few strings and get a jail sentence reduced to community service. And so he reports to a local community center, where the director, the lovely Ms. Parker (Lynn Whitfield), gives him the option of being a mentor to a group of boys who are the laughing stock of the street dancing scene. Sean wants nothing to do with them. He hates children. And initially, the feeling is mutual.

Already, you can see the wheels turning. The film will not only be about the freeing and redemptive power of dance, it will also be a buddy story, where Sean learns to open his heart and not be so materialistic. He becomes especially close with a boy named Eric Smith (Tristen M. Carter), whose sass talking masks hurt over a drug-addicted mother and a father who abandoned him. As all this is being established, Stokes works in a puppy-love romance between Eric and Ms. Parker’s niece, Chantel (Chandler Kinney), who speaks softly, smiles beautifully, and delivers flowery dialogue that would have been better suited for a second-tier greeting card. And, of course, Sean and Ms. Parker will inevitably fall in love. All of this happens only because that’s what convention requires. Absolutely nothing happens organically.

Meanwhile, Sean, who is admittedly not a dancer, takes it upon himself to train Eric and his friends for numerous dance auditions, which then leads to the Battlefield America competition. They’re repeatedly confronted in public places by a rival dance crew led by Hank “The Shockwave” Adams (Christopher Michael Jones). It’s one thing to have influence over a group of adults, but when you knowingly brainwash a group of boys into being bullies, you have officially crossed into dangerous territory. Shockwave and his crew are the current reigning champions of Battlefield America, which should already tell you everything you need to know about how the movie ends.

I take that back. Stokes also works in scenes with Sean’s stuffy boss, a hardened prosecution attorney, a mom who refuses to let her son dance at the competition, and the sudden reappearance of Eric’s father. To say that the finale wraps everything up a neat little package would be a massive understatement. Never have I witnessed a more miraculous turnaround, especially with such a large group of characters. It’s bad enough that there is not one iota of truth in “Battlefield America”; to turn child actors into hapless victims of the plot is just plain inexcusable. Stokes objectifies them, I suspect more to satisfy his own personal filmmaking desires than for the sake of entertaining the audience. This is a shamefully phony movie – one of the year’s worst.

— Chris Pandolfi (www.atatheaternearyou.net)

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