ABCD: Not everybody can dance

Any body can dance
Starring: Prabhu Deva, Ganesh Acharya, Kay Kay Menon, Terence Lewis Shakti Mohan
Rated: 5.5/10
Anybody Can Dance? Really?? If it’s the Remo kind of dance you see in this one, you must be joking guys. It should come with statutory warning — it could be injurious to health. But then, if you have this nasha, you don’t apparently need any other nasha, at least not the one that comes with drugs. Or so says dance master Prabhu Deva who, incidentally, does not do the best dance that could have been in the movie — Muqabla, muqabla, oh laila.
Having said that, this is by far the most ambitious, most keenly choreographed put-on-your-dancing-shoes movie to have visited Bollywood. So, in the bargain if you are also made to put on your ballet shoes, your acrobat shoes and your running shoes to do a whole lot of daredevilry both on and off the dance studios, so be it. For, modern dancing I am told, misses its completeness if it does not punch, gyrate, twist the bones and do impossible stunts in the name of dance.
ABCD, in 3D if you must, is a scorer in that genre. It lacks in good music and good songs but it does bring out the rhythm from extreme form of dancing, even if it is the gentle genre of ballet.
The dancing comes pretty late into the movie and when your audience is geared for only that, it comes as a slowdown. The politics of dancing academies and the corruption in reality shows should’ve just been the background and not the forefront in which choreographer Shiva (straight from Chennai Prabhu Deva) gets chucked out by his friend turned foe and owner of a premier dance academy that wins most reality jigs.
All these woes and angst spoil the fun which comes in when a whole lot of dancing youngsters take the stage. The centerpiece is the winning dance number in which Remo puts in his heart and that shows up pretty stunningly. But sad, he couldn’t do much justice to the inserted Prabhu number. And where were those loose pants which make him a wonder in flexibility? But all these are side thoughts. It’s the effort that counts here.
Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer, 10 February, 2013

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