Take the Lead

This is really a combination of two different kinds of movies that I've seen a zillion times before, starting with The Blackboard Jungle and Rock, Rock, Rock and moving forward through the years with things like To Sir, with Love and many others.

In this one suave, polite dancing instructor Pierre Dulaine (Antonio Banderas) goes to an inner-city school to teach dancing to the kids in detention. At the end the students to to the big dance contest. You can figure out what happens in between.

There are a lot of things to criticize in the movie. The kids in detention, for one, seem like a bunch of real sweethearts. The principal mentions some of the reasons they might be there, but they demonstrate none of those behaviors in the movie. They're just great kids. We're shown the tough home lives of a couple of them, but both the kids are hard workers who want to graduate and make something of themselves. In the competition at the end, the beginning dancers are up against the best of the best, which would never happen in a real contest. And so on. None of that matters, really, at least not to me. The movie's still very entertaining, and Banderas gives one of the best performances I've seen from him. There's some good dancing of all kinds.

If you're an old guy like me, you remember that in movies like Don't Knock the Rock the parents hate the dances the kids do, and they hate the music. Here, the kids hate the music that Banderas brings to them, and the upper-crust dancers hate the music of the inner city. But in the old rock 'n' roll movies, the parents always ended up dancing to the music of the kids. Stay through the closing credits of Take the Lead and see how the old trope plays out.