Smooth waltzes, intense tangos and hot hip-hop moves mix in a film that details what apparently goes on in some after-school detentions.
"Take the Lead" is based on the true story of Pierre Dulaine, played by the sexy Antonio Banderas. The story follows Dulaine, a Manhattan dance teacher and competitor, who volunteers his time to teach ballroom dancing to a group of inner-city high school students in detention.
Dulaine becomes involved in the program after witnessing an incident involving a student and the principal's car. He returns to the school the next day to teach the kids how to dance. The principal, Alfre Woodard (Augustine James of "Beauty Shop"), thinks this is hilarious and bets Dulaine $5 he will not be back the next day. Woodard is proven wrong, and the dance begins.
"Take the Lead" has a helping-kids-find-hope theme similar to that of "Dangerous Minds" and a dozen other films, but is different in that it encompasses the idea of ballroom dancing, which delightfully clashes with inner-city culture.
It remains a predictable movie throughout. The students come from poor neighborhoods, where their parents are drunks and prostitutes. The kids deal drugs and work dead-end jobs just to make enough money to put food on the table.
Banderas does not dominate the movie, which allows the attention to be placed on the students. The students know how to hip-hop dance like it's their job but they say that ballroom dancing is lame, stiff, and shows no emotion. "Love," Dulaine says, "can be found in any form of dance."
He then goes on to dance with a student from the academy where he teaches expensive dance classes. His class is floored, with one girl proclaiming: "It's like sex on hardwood."
Eventually, he combines the disciplines of ballroom dance with the high energy of hip-hop dance and earns the students' respect. He promises that if the students work hard, they can enter the dance competition to contend for a prize of $5,000.
The movie also incorporates the hackneyed showdown between the bourgeois and the proletariat. Tempers erupt when the students serving detention meet the upper-class students from the academy.
Typical insults are hurled back and forth as the inner-city kids yell about the other dancers being white and uppity. The trained dancers respond, saying the others are too poor to be in the studio, and too primitive to be dancing on the same floor.
There are many conflicts that go on throughout the movie that do not take place in school, often causing kids to end up at Dulaine's house. Many incidents occur to reinforce the underlying reality that most of these students cannot afford to spend their time training in an art from which their class has been shunned.
Writer Dianne Houston has the right idea making a movie about dancing since it seems to be a popular theme with other movies such as "Dirty Dancing," "Grease," "Save the Last Dance," "Shall We Dance?" and "Mad Hot Ballroom." Maybe it's because so many people cannot dance and wish they could. Maybe it is because dancing is erotic. Whatever the reason, the formula makes successful movies.
