Written by: Duane Adler & Cheryl Edwards
Starring: Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas, Terry Kinney, Fredro Starr, Bianca Lawson
Rating: [1/5]
While not very kind to say, sometimes you watch a movie and experience the second-hand embarrassment of what appears on-screen not because of what purposefully transpires within the narrative but rather the production thinking they pulled something off when they landed way off of the mark. A movie like Save the Last Dance certainly tries to instill a progressive story but ends up crafting something quite deranged in the depiction of its characters and quite the offensive set of plot points.
Following the death of her mother when trying to drive to her Julliard audition, Sara (Julia Stiles) now lives with her father and attends a majority-Black high school. While at this school she stands out because of her skin color but befriends Chenille (Kerry Washington) and eventually begins a courtship with her brother Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas) as they both try to achieve their dreams.
Not that this feature deserves any further research but I would love to pick the brain of the individuals who crafted this movie to truly learn if they understood what they made with this film. Something undoubtedly has positive intentions but ultimately stands as a mind-boggling visual experience and not in a good way. Not only do you have a confusing lead character in what motivates her, but you transplant her into a majority Black school with every character serving as a stereotype.
While not many of the Black characters in the school get many lines, the main ones who do along with Sara consist of Chenille, a teenage mother, and Derek, an upstanding gentleman but one whose friends with a gangster and mulls over helping him with a drive-by. I’m not here to point fingers, but I would imagine someone who did not think too kindly of Black people had the opportunity to integrate two of them into a story centered on a white girl, those descriptions may fall into how they would like to depict this race of individuals.
This gets said with full knowledge of who crafted this feature but it still very much boggles the mind of how they thought anything within this plot would work and this happens on multiple fronts. Not only in the way they frame the Black characters but also in the purpose they serve in the story, which centers completely on Sara and her personal journey, which admittedly has plenty of sadness. She gives up dancing because the last time she did her mother happened to die. Something that may sound ridiculous to some but no one has room to judge how another grieves. This feature thus becomes about the journey of how she can incorporate Black culture through Hip-Hop into her dance routine to get her to a mostly white art institution of Julliard. Something worth raising an eyebrow at, but even worse, the dance choreography in this feature is quite terrible.
Nothing serves as a better source of laughter if one needs it than searching up Sara’s audition scene at the end for Julliard. A routine where she integrates both classic ballet and Hip-Hop dance moves into moves that forced me to wash my eyes out at the film’s conclusion. Not to spoil the film but the fact she gets into Julliard after that performance demonstrates her audition served as nothing more than a formality and her place at this prestigious art institution was always going to be hers. The dance in this film would only truly work if these filmmakers made this feature a satire of this very story in having a white teenager utilize Black culture for her own gain and thus leaving everyone behind in the process. However, no, this feature delivers everything here with a straight face, which simply makes me chuckle if it did not result in an abjectly terrible movie as well.
Simply a misfire by everyone involved in delivering something so horribly misguided where we follow Julia Stiles as Sara embraces Black culture in a way that looks incredibly offputting and almost offensive. With Julia Stiles operating at the height of her powers at this time, perhaps she should have looked at this film and taken a pass as it never had the opportunity to work with such a horrific plot but also embarrassing dance choreography meant to pass off as a fusion of two cultures that will eventually take her all the way to Julliard. It must be said, if that routine got her into Julliard then everyone should call for an audition and just do some random interpretive dance to receive a guaranteed admission to this supposed prestigious school.
Films with Josh 
