My Review of "Battle of the Year"

Battle of the Year is a dance movie that came out in 2013. I enjoyed watcing this movie back when it first came out. There were fond memories at that moment that coincided the dance scene as a whole. Years later I became worried I was going to have a different opinion of the movie.

This movie starts out with an introduction of what Battle of the Year breakdance competition is all about. It's an actual real life breakdance event that's been going on for decades and is still going on to this day. It's a worldwide breakdance competition that pits the worlds best in team competition. Each country sends their best team to compete much like the world cup.

Unfortunately the United States hasn't won the competition in over a decade even though that's where the dance came from. It's hard for some to swallow the fact that this dance is popular everywhere but where it came from. We have the catalyst of the story when Dante wants to create a dream team for the United States. He's a CEO of a big hip hop conglomerate and wants to win back respect for the US.

To do this he hires on an old friend Jason. Unfortunately, Jason has been going through a tough time and he has to fight his demons to bring the win back to the United States.

We then get put through a ton of cliché scenarios. Of course you have to have some inner fighting amongst the team that needs to be ironed out. We also have to have our training montages and see how our team bonds over their differences.

As a whole this movie does all of the cliched scenes justice. It's still very much enjoyable if you're into sports movies. I happen to be a fan of sports movies and I also love breakdancing so it's a perfect marriage for me.

I also liked that they used real breakdance icons, events and knowledge in this movie. It's sprinkled generously throughout the movie and I hope some kids become interested in the dance as a result of watching this. Then again it's such an old movie it's probably totally off their radars.

There are however a few negatives I started realizing in this movie. I remember being dazzled by the dancing but I forgot about how weird some of the acting was. At times it feels like a high school play.

In addition to the awkward acting there is a ton of Sony product placement throughout this movie. There's quite a lot of advertising in general and that kind of took me away from the experience. Some scenes literally have characters framing the product to the screen and talking about how great the product was as if it was a commercial.

Representation is an interesting issue with this movie. You can tell that they're trying to do good with their representation. They tried to have a small side story as one of the dancers was gay but in a pretty in your face kind of way. If this movie was made today I'm sure that they would have added some female dancers to the mix. Especially since female breakdancers have come a long way. They're pretty even in some regards to their male counterparts today.

Still this is a dance movie. There are a ton of dance movies that bring our expectation bar pretty low. This movie is definitely better than 75 percent of dance movies out there. That's why I'm surprised not a ton of people know about this movie.

Overall, I was still able to enjoy this movie almost a decade later. There were some obvious issues with this movie that can be ignored. Though they might be difficult to ignore. The most important factor of the movie is that it was entertaining. I think the whole family can enjoy this movie and that's why I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. They could probably do a proper sequel to this movie that corrects all of its previous misgivings.