You Got Served

PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 1/30/04)

For more than 20 years, the most exciting form of dance hasn't been happening on the stage or in the club, but on the streets. The thing about watching break-dancing on its natural turf is that it's virtually impossible to see the moves while peering over shoulders or jostling for a gap in the crowd. The beauty of You Got Served is that it delivers the moves from every vantage point: crew formations from above; head spins, "suicides," flips, freezes, and slow-motion gags from the sidelines; and plenty of attitude from directly in their midst.

Nearly half the movie's 93-minute running time is spent on dancing, and the camera has a way of getting so caught up in the action that the screen shakes every time a jumping dancer lands. The only problem—and you can blame it on MTV—is that the quick cutting intended to keep the energy flowing actually makes the dancing more difficult to follow (the same criticism applies to movies like Chicago and Moulin Rouge).

Before shooting began, the dancers rehearsed for eight weeks to develop off-the-hook new dance moves, which begs the question: Who was working on the script during that time? When they aren't dancing, hip-hop stars Marques Houston (of IMx) and Omari Grandberry ("Omarion" of the now-defunct boy band B2K) seem to be stuck in a street-savvy after-school special. Luckily, the two young actors are charming enough as best friends Elgin and David. As a pair, they're "like Shaq and Kobe together," but apart—well, nobody's gonna buy the dramatic fallout that turns the partners against one another, so it hardly matters.

Writer-director Christopher B. Stokes goes too far out of the way to manufacture conflict — a star-crossed romance, a drug deal gone bad, a drive-by shooting — when he needn't do anything more than indicate that the N*SYNC outcast who stole David and Elgin's moves is gonna get served by the movie's end. At least Stokes puts the dancing first. That much is clear from his choice of cameos, which extend beyond the usual hip-hop stable (Lil' Kim and La La Vasquez put in appearances) to include choreographer Wade Robson and B-boy superstar Oscar Orosco. Here's a movie with moves.

—Peter Debruge