Not content with taking their President in Olympus Has Fallen, the Koreans now claim the Americans’ B-Boying title too – a title they haven’t won in over a decade. The US simply cannot allow this, so they send in an ex-basketball coach (Lost’s Josh Holloway) to slap the ego out of the nation’s top B-Boys in order to glue some necessary cohesion into ‘The Dream Team’. A sports film doesn’t have to tread new grounds to be effective, and Battle of the Year knows exactly when the big hand strikes montage-o’clock. However, that satisfying ‘click’ that comes with teamwork camaraderie doesn’t quite spark, with potentially interesting side characters brushed aside for the petty rivalry between Chris Brown’s character Rooster and his former BFF, who hold a grudge for the most idiotic of reasons.
Given its genre, you could forgive the multitude of flaws or blatant product placement for Sony tablets and director Benson Lee’s own Planet B-Boy (“it’s the B-Boy bible!”) if the dancing on display is worth it. Unfortunately, it’s not. Aside from two scenes – The Dream Team’s Top 4 qualifier and the Russian squad’s human Voltron routine – the dance sequences are often rendered incoherent due largely to messy editing. I was longing for the choreographed creativity and perfectly composed long takes seen in the far superior Step Up 3D, but Battle of the Year would rather use crowd-shot cutaways to convince you of the dancers’ prowess than focusing on the stage.
‘Battle of the Year 3D’ Movie Times
