Prior to viewing this, my favorite bad movie was Showgirls. Well Joe Eszterhas, move over because there's a new sheriff in (Brave)town and his name is Oscar Torres. Oscar has taken elements of Footloose, Flashdance, Step Up and every maudlin family drama from the Lifetime and the Hallmark Channel and clumsily mixed them into this rotting carcass of a script.
Josh, a 17 year old Electronica DJ at a club in the big city by night, is sullen and unhappy because daddy left, and his single and working mom doesn't keep milk in the fridge. Meanwhile he spends his nights partying like a boss at the club, scoring with a hot groupie and getting millions of views on line while popping pills left and right until he overdoses. In an unintentionally hilarious scene, Josh appears before a judge, who reads a long list of priors and then sentences him to spend a year in North Dakota with his estranged dad. Sure, that would happen.
Before you know it, Josh is the toast of little town America with his dance grooves. There are plenty of tear filled side plots about people who have lost family and friends in various wars and can't get past their grief. Until our own little Pollyanna, that's Josh folks, comes into their lives and starts to heal them while he himself is healed. And it's all done so simply and quickly through bad movie magic!
But the real capper is the big dance finale. In a small town that has lost many citizens to various wars, Josh decides to get the dance team, who have made it to the state finals (is this really a thing? I mean, I thought Bring It On was just a fever dream), to dance to his electronica take on the score of Platoon. When my jaw hit the floor, I picked it up so I could stifle the laughter. Honestly, I felt like I had popped one of the pills that sent Josh to North Dakota. It is so cynical and wrong headed of the makers of the film that it would leave a bad taste in your mouth if the whole enterprise wasn't so moronically stupid and ridiculous.
Bravetown works better as a comedy than drama, but really fails even at that. I'm giving it 2 stars rather than zero because it made me laugh really hard at certain scenes throughout.
Josh, a 17 year old Electronica DJ at a club in the big city by night, is sullen and unhappy because daddy left, and his single and working mom doesn't keep milk in the fridge. Meanwhile he spends his nights partying like a boss at the club, scoring with a hot groupie and getting millions of views on line while popping pills left and right until he overdoses. In an unintentionally hilarious scene, Josh appears before a judge, who reads a long list of priors and then sentences him to spend a year in North Dakota with his estranged dad. Sure, that would happen.
Before you know it, Josh is the toast of little town America with his dance grooves. There are plenty of tear filled side plots about people who have lost family and friends in various wars and can't get past their grief. Until our own little Pollyanna, that's Josh folks, comes into their lives and starts to heal them while he himself is healed. And it's all done so simply and quickly through bad movie magic!
But the real capper is the big dance finale. In a small town that has lost many citizens to various wars, Josh decides to get the dance team, who have made it to the state finals (is this really a thing? I mean, I thought Bring It On was just a fever dream), to dance to his electronica take on the score of Platoon. When my jaw hit the floor, I picked it up so I could stifle the laughter. Honestly, I felt like I had popped one of the pills that sent Josh to North Dakota. It is so cynical and wrong headed of the makers of the film that it would leave a bad taste in your mouth if the whole enterprise wasn't so moronically stupid and ridiculous.
Bravetown works better as a comedy than drama, but really fails even at that. I'm giving it 2 stars rather than zero because it made me laugh really hard at certain scenes throughout.