By now you already know the essentials. This is like scores of other movies that mix the competition genre  success in life as dedication to some competitive sport  with the black kids redeemed by tough dedicated teacher. Its a predictable grind. <br /><br />There are other distractions: the patronizing tone is heavier than usual, Banderas, usually charming, has some syrupy lines that might have been forgiven if he had actually danced. I guess it wasn't in his contract. The final peculiarity comes if you saw "Mad Hot Ballroom." The competition is in actually learning the graces of ballroom dancing, but this movie wants it both ways and ends with a hop hop sequence. It is as if he talked them into entering a polo context and they won it by playing basketball.<br /><br />Well, I forgive all this, because the dance is handled cinematically, and that's good enough for me. Forget all the tepid excuses and bozo morality and just look at this as an episode in the long love affair between movies and dance.<br /><br />This particular thread started with Fred Astair I suppose. The problem was that movies were trying to become something more than stage shows. So they had to figure some way to merge dance that would appear in the story. Astair combined ballroom dancing with the kind of stage dancing from the old era. <br /><br />This way, it made sense in a subtle but important way and we ended up with a whole class of dance folding in what followed.<br /><br />This movie is essentially about hip hop dance merged with "whitebread" ballroom dancing. The fold is ordinary: at the end we have an audience on-screen engaged in their sometimes nice business of polite dancing, sometimes with a representation of passion but not real passion.<br /><br />And what gets folded in is "real" life, real passion (supposedly, though who believes kids can know anything about passion?).<br /><br />So if you are going to judge this, there are only two things to watch for:<br /><br />Is the passionate dance passionate? Is it real? Do you feel that you are taking risks with it; that you are seeing the dancers at the edge? Is it Jazz? Does it hurt?<br /><br />No it doesn't. You never escape the reality that these are professional dancers picked to match the required stereotypes and who are moving clumsily by design. Then when they bust out you know you are watching something choreographed.<br /><br />secondly:<br /><br />Does the camera dance? After all, the whole thing is about enfolding us into the energy of the thing. And it is possible to place the camera amid the dance and animate it as if we were ourselves busting out.<br /><br />And this does reward a bit, especially in the editing until the end. That end I guess is too important to the producers, so it abruptly shifts into conventional camera mode. It may have been shot first with a different creating crew.<br /><br />But earlier, the camera does engage. And the lighting is subtly edgy. <br /><br />Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.