While watching the new dance competition film Work It (available on Netflix August 7), my viewing partner and I tried to come up with an appropriate alternate title for the film. Bring the Perfect Dance was the best we could manage, Frankensteining together Work It’s most obvious, uh, references: cheerleading film Bring It On; the mortifying 2001 artifact Save the Last Dance; and of course the more recent Pitch Perfect films, about college a cappella groups doing battle.
Work It, from director Laura Terruso and writer Alison Peck, shifts the action to high school (so, back to where Bring It On and Save the Last Dance laid their scenes) and gets to moving. The film is about a dance crew competition, as a ragtag bunch of weirdos (I guess) squares off against the cruel hegemony of their school’s reigning squad. The setup is more than familiar, as is pretty much every plot beat that follows. We know that ambitious Duke University hopeful Quinn (Sabrina Carpenter) will somehow be swept up in her school’s dance-mad culture, just as we know that her cynical reasons for joining in—by livening up her extracurricular resumé she hopes to appease a Duke admissions rep—will eventually soften into a deeper, more earnest commitment.
The pleasures of Work It do not lie in discovery. I suppose it’s possible that some of the film’s audience, its youngest contingent perhaps, has not seen any of Work It’s many antecedents, so the struggle of Quinn and her friends (chief among them her bestie, Jas, played by YouTube star Liza Koshy) will seem brand new. But most people pressing play on a light high school dance movie right now will probably have some sense of what the whole thing is going to be about. It’s a variation on a theme, a riff in a slightly different chord. Those small differences will have to be enough.
For the most part, they are. The film’s biggest asset is, unsurprisingly, its choreography, done with playful crispness by Aakomon Jones, who also worked on the Pitch Perfect movies. Jones fuses together a variety of styles and cultures of dance, somehow making the crews’ routines eye-popping showstoppers and strangely accessible. “Could I do that?,” one almost wonders, watching Quinn and company as they practice for the big show. It’s the gift of the old cliché: they make it look easy, and thus make us want to try it ourselves. (Had I actually tried doing what the kids in the film do, this review would likely have been published posthumously.) In that way, Work It nails the can-do, we’re all in this together (oh, right, High School Musical!) spirit it’s going for, staging a true celebration of dance as joyful communion rather than the slavish pursuit of perfection it’s so often thought to be, is frequently depicted as, and actually can be in certain sectors of the professional field.
A thin movie like this can coast a long way on that moxie, but it’s not quite enough to make up a whole picture. To that end, there is also romance, between Quinn and the older, slightly embittered former high school dance star, Jake, whom Quinn recruits to train her new team. He’s played by Jordan Fisher. Those of you who saw To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You—or were able to catch him on Broadway in Dear Evan Hansen just before the pandemic closed all theaters down—will know Fisher’s magnetism already. Those who aren’t familiar ought to be immediately smitten with Fisher’s brand of warm suavity. He’s a solid actor and a great dancer (he does not, alas, sing in this one), possessed of the right smolder for a movie about high school students. Though he’s almost too powerful a crush object for a movie as slight as Work It, which may be why he’s used sparingly. He’s a central part of the film, yet Fisher seems merely to dart through it on occasion, the filmmakers perhaps too nervous about the effects prolonged exposure might have on the viewers at home.