Lucinda Dickey – Christian Sauvé

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-10-282023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2019) In the pantheon of movies more famous for their title than their content, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo has achieved a special notoriety. The subtitle can and has been applied to everything else as a signifier of “stupid movie sequel title,” and it feels vaguely sacrilegious to actually check out the actual movie. The result is … mixed. Released eight months after the original film, it’s clearly undercooked: the dialogue is serviceable, the storyline is the same “put on a show to save the community centre” nonsense we’ve seen since the 1930s and the characterization is paper-thin. Still, they did a lot in those eight months: There are a few spectacular numbers thrown in the mix here, bringing along a shift toward more classical musical comedy numbers in which everybody in the neighbourhood starts dancing to the same song. Such homages to classic musicals seem near to Electric Boogaloo’s heart—there’s notably a dance sequence using a rotating gimbal set that harkens back to Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling. It’s cute, and frankly the story (as hackneyed as is it) does feel stronger and more substantial even in its clichés than the first film: There’s even quite a bit of class commentary. Ice-T is back to the forefront, while two-movie actress Sabrina Garcia has a cute little comedy role entirely in Spanish and lead Lucinda Dickey once again fails to impress. As a much-derided title, Electric Boogaloo is perhaps a bit better than you’d expect, but you do have to be in the mood for a bit of a cultural time travel back to 1984 to appreciate it.

Movie Review

Breakin’ (1984)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-10-282023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2019) In between BMX Bandits, Beat Street and the Breakin’ duo, there was a spate of youth-culture movies in 1983-84 … and they are more interesting today as pop-culture archeological documents than movies in their own right. Breakin’ is what it says on the label: a movie entirely dedicated to breakdancing, albeit with contemporary music and Ice-T showing up on the soundtrack (although not always clearly on the screen). The story itself is the stuff boredom is made of, but it’s not as important as the dance sequences it features. The hair, the clothes, the slang may be hopelessly dated (and that’s part of Breakin’ charm) but the physicality of the performances remains intact. If nothing else, the film clearly illustrates how the 1980s completed a shift in the musical comedy form, going from the MGM ideal of non-diegetic dance numbers popping out of nowhere to a form in which pop songs replaced special songs and integrated more smoothly in the flow. The acting is forgettable (there isn’t anything special about Lucinda Dickey), the story is dull, but the rest of worth a slightly fascinated look, only to see what teenagers found cool back then. (Me? I was slightly too young and speaking the wrong language to have any first-hand memory of that subculture.) Breakin’ wouldn’t feel out of place next to some other youth dance movies of the past three decades, from the Step Up series to anything featuring a dance-battle sequence. Still, that’s part of the charm—the visuals change, but everything else stays the same.