Born to Dance is a hip hop dance movie that comes to us from New Zealand. If you’re wondering what makes a New Zealand hip hop dance movie different from a hip hop dance movie from anywhere else in the world, the answer is…not a lot. Apart from a few Auckland geographical references, there is very little in this movie that feels specific New Zealand. The film doesn’t stray very far from the established formula, delivering an overly familiar cinematic experience.
Tu (Tia Maipi) doesn't have very many prospects, as someone from the poorer side of Auckland. His military dad wants him to enlist in the army at the end of the summer. But Tu dreams of becoming a professional hip hop dancer. And he gets a chance to audition for the K Crew, the top dance crew in all of New Zealand. Tu takes the chance, traveling two times a week to the ritzy North Shore for rehearsals, hoping to make all his dreams come true. But it all comes at a cost, and soon Tu is made to question if all of this is actually worth it.
It's the basic dance movie template moved to New Zealand. The film doesn't really offer much in terms of cultural specifics. There's some country specific flavor in the apparent economic tension between the two sides of Auckland, but the story they end up telling could take place anywhere else in the world. It turns out that hip hop dance culture is pretty much the same everywhere, with the same type of battles between the same type of people taking place in all the same type of location.
The dancing, while undoubtedly skilled, doesn't look any different from any other dance movie out there. And when it gets to the point where crews are pitted against each other, it is really hard to tell what makes one routine better than the other. It makes it difficult for the film to generate any drama from these sequences. It just feels like a lot of showing off. Outside the dancing, the drama feels trite. It's all just a bunch of broad tropes, very little of it feeling in any way genuine.
You've got a disapproving parent that doesn't understand the main character's passion for dance. But of course, the dad is inevitably won over when he actually sees the kid dance. Apparently it was that simple. There is an evil dance crew that needs to be taken down. Is this a thing in real life? Are the top dance crews actually all evil, using nefarious means to keep their spot? Films like these talk about how dance unites people, but they also tend to feature over-the-top villains that go against that very idea. Production values are fine for what they are, and the acting is okay as well. But this movie as a whole just isn’t very interesting.
Born to Dance squanders the chance to show us more about New Zealand, to take the basic template of the hip hop dance movie and enhance it with local flavor. Because this film has been made before, several times. Practically every other hip hop dance movie is about an underdog crew taking on the top dogs at some huge competition. There’s so little variation that this movie may as well not exist. This is a genre that needs to find new stories, as it’s been repeating itself for the last decade or so. While this isn’t a particularly bad example of the form, we hardly need New Zealand to give us more iterations of the same.
My Rating:
