Save The Last Dance

Esentially a hip-hop version of Dirty Dancing (yes, that bad) Save The Last Dance is a crushingly predictable affair of the all-too-familiar 'boy meets girl from opposite side of the tracks and they get together through their mutual love of dance' variety. It stars the talented but constantly ill-used Julia Stiles (Down To You, Ten Things I Hate About You) as Sara, a bright young ballet hopeful who, simultaneously, fails an examination for the ultra-prestigious Juilliard Dance Academy, and loses her mother in a tragic car accident (the film's only humorous touch).

Suddenly, poor Sara's world is turned upside down as she is sent to live with her estranged father, a ne'er-do-well jazz muso on Chicago's mainly-black South Side. She promptly gives up ballet and starts to attend the local hip-hop club with her new black friends (awww!) - particularly Derek (Thomas) who is valiantly struggling against the odds to get into medical school. He teaches her hip-hop dancing and helps her through personal traumas - including her aversion to ballet - and, slowly but surely, Love (awww!) begins to blossom between the pair, in spite of fierce local opposition led by his best mate and his jealous ex.

While Save The Last Dance has a sensitively-handled forbidden teen romance at its core - and therefore should be at least partly likeable - it is likely to inspire an overwhelming sense of deja vu even in viewers who've never seen a film before. Stiles and Thomas aren't loathsome by any means, but they never stood the ghost of a chance: the audition is a virtual remake of the closing scenes of Flashdance (ouch!), and as surely as night follows day and death follows life, the movie works its way towards one of those horrendous crescendoes where everyone clears the dancefloor to cheer on the central couple as they strut their stuff (Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Dirty Dancing, Ten Things etc. etc. etc.)

Mercifully, the film sidelines the gang-warfare shtick which has characterised most recent Hollywood forays into the 'hood (Dangerous Minds etc) - but it's still culpably guilty of employing the sort of casual racial stereotyping that went out of fashion with The Black And White Minstrel Show. As Derek's top mate explains:- "The Black Man is about madness and mayhem!"

To be honest, the entirety of Save The Last Dance's gist seems to be that black people are endowed with plenty of natural rhythm. Still, for all its annoying flaws and surfeit of cliches, an MTV youth movie actively promoting inter-racial romance is something to be welcomed.