"Breaking Through" (Guardian 27/07/18)

Breaking Through *

Dir: John Swetnam. With: Sophia Aguiar, Shaun Brown, Kelsey Crane, Marissa Heart. 101 mins. Cert: 12A

Despite the patronage of exec-producer John Legend, this entirely flavourless dance flick has taken three years to find distribution; now that it’s here, it doesn’t drag its feet so much as shuffle them with bland indifference. Writer-director John Swetnam has given the boilerplate narrative that underlaid his Step Up 4 screenplay a vaguely zeitgeisty twist, in that Californian suburbanite Casey (Sophia Aguiar) spends her downtime choreographing YouTube clips with her Doritos-ad pals. Can she retain her integrity after a bigshot sweeps in with plans to make her a star? Anybody with “heroine tempted to ditch her crew” in the dance-trope sweepstake should hold onto their ticket.

There follow 101 minutes of inanities and inconsistencies, without a consoling trace of the genre’s fleeting pleasures. Again, these teens bemoan their lowly place in the gig economy while hanging out in a loft space with a six-figure scatter-cushion budget; the incongruous reference one emergent bodypopper makes to the now quarter-century old Wayne’s World marks the film as recognisably the work of middle-aged men. They’ve scrimped money elsewhere. Unlike the studio-backed Step Ups, this indie hasn’t the resources to nab the big hits, so we instead get a low-watt cameo from popstrel Anitta (“She’s the Katy Perry of Brazil!”) and market-stall knock-offs of recent chart sounds.

In an ideal world, any dance movie’s predictable narrative manoeuvres would be disrupted by the dynamism of its setpieces, but even on the basic level of cobbled together talent showcase, Breaking Through fails to function. The routines Swetnam elects to commit to film are framed with zero distinguishing flair; more thought has gone into prominently positioning one YouTube channel’s logos, and crowbarring insidious talk of branding, shingles and cross-promotional traffic between the usual glib platitudes and awkward burps of exposition. The comparatively innocent delights of the Mashed Potato – heck, even the Macarena – seem a very long time ago. 

Breaking Through opens in selected cinemas from today.