You Got Served, slang for beating somebody at something, is a hip-hop dance movie, a boys' own answer to the cheerleader flick Bring It On.
It is pretty much the same cliched story: Two California crews battling it out for supremacy, with subdued racial overtones and romantic interludes.
In the popular and surprisingly good Bring It On, the cheerleading squads waged war with pompoms and gymnastic moves. Cultural differences were sensitively explored.
In the surprisingly bad You Got Served, the hip-hop dance teams do it in cool ghetto gear with gymnastic moves. To their credit, the race card is not over-played. While the key heroes are black and the most obvious villains are white, both crews are racially integrated. The "gangsta" mentality is kept to an absolute minimum.
Even more credit goes to the dancers in You Got Served. The spectacle is absolutely staggering. It is West Side Story exploded 10 times over. A point of comparison: Cuba Gooding Jr. just thinks he's a master dance artist (witness his self-involved breakdancing at the end of The Fighting Temptations). The lesser-known dancers in You Got Served, including Ivan (Flipz) Velez, are the real deal, and no special effects were used to enhance their gravity-defying stunts. Any one of them could serve Gooding in a second.
Combine that with funky music. While the dynamic songs -- and the incidental crowd noise in the movie -- are played at eardrum-shredding levels, the pure performance in You Got Served turns it into an epic hip-hop music video.
Unfortunately, almost everything else is abysmal, from sound quality to picture. Critically, with the exception of comic actor Steve Harvey (as the 'hood mentor) and Lil' Kim (a mere cameo as herself), the acting is wretched.
Music producer and video director Stokes, whose only other movie was House Party 4, clearly needed help. He could have used an experienced co-director to handle the dramatic moments with his iffy cast of youngsters, most of whom are rappers, not actors. Samuel L. Jackson was talking about this kind of embarrassment when, last year, he blasted the casting of non-actors in movies. The ambitious kids are not at fault: They seem to be keen and game. But they lack training and their performances lack everything.
I feel worst for the leads and supposed heroes of the piece, Marques Houston and Omari (Omarion) Grandberry. These two real-life brothers, both of them connected to the now defunct hip-hop group B2K, obviously try hard on screen. They emote. They sweat it out. They dance. They shoot hoops. They rage. They laugh. They want to cry.
In the end, they get served -- with a hard case of reality.
(This film is rated PG)
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