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Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
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| Year: |
1984
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Director: |
Sam Firstenberg
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| Stars: |
Lucinda Dickey, Adolfo Quinones, Michael Chambers, Jo De Winter, John Christy Ewing, Sabrina Garcia, Peter MacLean, William Cort, Susie Coelho, Paulette McWilliams, Ice-T, Harry Caesar, Herb Mitchell
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| Genre: |
Musical |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Kelly Bennett (Lucinda Dickey) now has a successful career as a dancer with a big audition coming up soon. Meanwhile, Ozone (Adolfo Quinones) and Turbo (Michael Chambers) are part of their thriving community centre which teaches various skills such as dancing, boxing, and the arts. When Kelly arrives to see the two of them one day, after not having been in contact for a while due to her work, they take her to the centre, named "Miracles", to show her around and suggest she could become a teacher there. She likes the idea, and everyone celebrates by dancing through the streets, but there are dark clouds on the horizon: Miracles might not be around for much longer...
Rushed out a mere six months after the original Breakin' was released, Electric Boogaloo was very much in the tradition of the nineteen-fifties rock and roll movies that saw the kids standing up to the adults who just didn't understand, and winning through with their youthful exuberance to show that their favoured music and dance was merely the display of high spirits. Naturally, the baddies are white and middle aged men who want to tear down Miracles and turn it into a shopping centre - where will the kids go? asks one concerned town council member, the answer probably being, the new shopping centre.
But we don't want to see the heart and soul of the community ripped out, do we? No. So when the kids learn of the plans, they come up with ideas of their own and start a fund to raise money to keep the developers away and refurbish the building. However, there's so much more to this film than that, as there's romance, gang rivalry and, erm, more dancing to see, although the dancing is more the type you'd have seen on an eighties television variety show than the breakdancing you enjoyed in the original film. If in doubt, throw in a musical number, seems to be the order of the day and their effervescent nature is undeniably amusing.
The romance is taken care of with Kelly and Ozone's on-again-off-again relationship which is jeopardised when a tough group of girls decide that they don't want Kelly seeing him, as she's a rich girl who shouldn't be hanging around with the likes of him. Turbo has his own problems when he catches the eye of a Latina girl (Sabrina Garcia) who doesn't speak English so their budding love affair has a few obstacles to get over before a happy ending can ensue. The message is one of positivity, that "why can't we all get along?" theme that serves this kind of thing so well; Ozone even ties to make peace with the black-clad gang who are determined to sabotage the Miracles efforts.
In truth, this doesn't have the novelty factor of its predecessor and there are signs that the film makers, including writers Jan Ventura and Julie Reichert, were running out of ideas even at this second instalment - it's no shock that there was never a third. That's not to say that there aren't moments of inspiration, as the film's most famous sequence illustrates: Chambers dancing around his room. That's literally dancing around his room, up the walls, across the ceiling and back down again; it's a great sequence and the highlight of the whole movie. But most of Breakin' 2 has the look of a Kids from Fame episode and that's about the extent of its ambitions. The music isn't as good as the first one, either, despite Ice-T appearing and rapping for about ten seconds. Watch for: the ridiculous hospital scene, which even sees a patient return from the dead through the power of Electric Boogaloo.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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