Synopsis:
Antonio Banderas is a ballroom dance instructor hired by a high school principal (Alfre Woodard) to supervise detention for the school’s most troubled students. The kids want nothing to do with Pierre and his classical moves. But when he takes a genuine interest in their hip-hop dancing and the kids themselves – a new style of dancing is born that takes the students all the way to a national competition and to finally believing in themselves.
Some things I noticed in the film:
Doesn’t it seem as if once actors reach a certain point in their careers, they always do a movie where they teach inner city kids how to better themselves?
Miles from Moesha was in this movie. He has really grown, hasn’t he?
Ya Ya from America’s Next Top Model Season 3 was in this movie.
Ray Liotta was a producer of this movie.
Pros:
The story was pretty good. This may seem like every other student/teacher movie, but the difference is, it focused on dancing instead of education.
Most of the characters did good jobs with their roles. I am not usually a fan of Antonio’s acting, but he did a good job as the ballroom teacher. For a lot of the kids in this movie, this was their first major role and they did good jobs with them.
The teacher in the movie was a minority. Usually in movies like this, the teacher is Caucasian while the class is predominantly filled with minorities.
The dancing in this movie was really good. I’m not usually into ballroom dancing, but it was pretty good. It made me interested in seeing more. I liked how the students found a way to combine ballroom and hip-hop dancing. I’m sure that was no easy task.
The majority of the students looked like they could have been in high school. Well at least as close as they can get.
The soundtrack was good. It made you want to get up and dance. Even the older classical songs were catchy.
Now let’s move on to the problems I had with this movie.
Cons:
If you’ve seen any movie where a teacher reaches out to urban city kids, you know what’s going to happen. They will give the teacher a hard time at first, but then they will like the teacher. If you didn’t realize that the students were going to adapt to the ballroom dancing, then you haven’t seen too many movies like this. There were some predictable moments in the movie:
- Rock and LaRette end up having personal problems in the movie.
- Rock, who gave Pierre the hardest time, ends up needing him later on in the movie. Naturally, he stopped giving him a hard time.
- Rock and LaRette don’t get along with each other, but they end up having a common ground when they end up dancing together.
- Pierre enters the students in a national competition where they are up against well-trained dancers. Do you think they’ll be able to handle themselves against the well-trained dancers?
I didn’t understand why Augustine was so determined to see Pierre fail at teaching the kids to dance? What was the point of allowing him to teach the kids if she didn’t want him to succeed at teaching them to dance?
Pierre is barely shown teaching the class how to dance. They pretty much taught themselves how to dance.
This movie suffers from overcrowding. It’s hard to get to know everyone because there’s too many people in the movie.
The writers tried to make Mr. Temple (a teacher at the school) look bad for being concerned with how dancing was going to help the kids. He was right. It wasn’t going to help them the way their education would have helped them. They are shown dancing more than they are shown doing their homework.
Spoiler warning: (Don’t read if you don’t want to be spoiled)
The ending leaves you hanging. We never did get to find out who won the competition. All they do is dance at the end, but they never reveal the winner of the competition.
Final thoughts:
Take The Lead is a pretty good movie if you like dancing. It makes you want to dance to the music. If you haven’t seen it, I would suggest that you check it out.
