It’s a relief knowing You Got Served sucks in any language. Nobody does song and dance quite like Bollywood, but if you make it into a team competition, I assure you the result will be just as bad as any western version. Phew!
This is the kind of a movie in which we introduce the main character in the first five minutes only to realize this guy isn’t going to be around for the next two hours. The Street Dancer team is led by a manchild who shatters a knee in the opening dance competition, so now he has a street dance studio to warn kids about the dangers of street dancing. But his is not our story; this tale is mostly about his brother, Sahej (Varun Dhawan). At least, I think it’s about Sahej; this film presents a number of fronts, but only really cares about where the next dance-off is happening.
Set in London and decidedly not in 3D, Street Dancer 3D begins with the exported rivalry between India and Pakistan. Inayat (Shraddha Kapoor) leads a Pakistani dance troupe that humbles their Indian rivals in an improvised street off. Oh no! All of India has been humiliated because Sahej has “tired moves.” How will the once-proud nation ever find itself again? Later, these two teams take their rivalry to a donut café where cricket on the telly features a match between India and Pakistan. The dance battle/food fight aftermath is not pretty. Hmmm … this is one of those public dance donut shop cricket gang warfare brawls I’m always reading about, isn’t it?
The exported foreign rivalry lasts exactly long enough to be forgotten when Sahej abandons the Indian-based team to join the Royals, a snooty English group of posh uniformed studio street dancers. At this time, the prize is introduced – a £100,000 winner-take-all dance off where the Royals are the favs. £100,000 sounds like an awful lot of dough until you realize that if the 20+ members of each dance team just worked minimum wage, they’d easily earn that amount during all their dance-time preparation.
Speaking of financial woes, Street Dancer 3D opted at this time in the screenplay to introduce a subplot on the topic of illegal immigration and the destructive path it wends for practitioners. As these actions are plot secondary and no single character is ever introduced, I come away from this irrelevance with, “congratulations, film, you’ve managed to make homeless issues even shallower than dance battles.”
No matter where you go in the You Got Served universe of team dance competition –no matter how cool, intricate, coordinated, or athletic the moves – every highly trained maneuver reduces exactly to posturing. Gang posturing is like a mob film without the violence … an immature mob film. For two-and-a-half hours. Street Dancer 3D is a film that doesn’t really know its protagonist, its conflict, nor its direction. But hey, sometimes there’s cool dancing.
Dancin’ fools, y’all better listen
There’s more here that y’all been missin’
National satisfaction
Requires some action
Dance it right, or Pakistan might be dissin’
Not Rated, 146 Minutes
Director: Remo D’Souza
Writer: Farhad Samji, Jagdeep Sidhu
Genre: The one where lives are ruined by an imperfect head spin
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Dancing teams?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Movie fans
