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Friday, September 23, 2005
'Roll Bounce' takes a spin on an all-too-familiar track
Roller boogie is back in this disco-era flashback, a shamelessly familiar concoction of dramatic cliches that recalls everything from "Saturday Night Fever" to "Strictly Ballroom" to "Bring It On." That may not be a handicap, considering that the Travolta dance melodrama is not a cultural landmark for its target youth audience.
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View all photosBow Wow (no longer so L'il) is X, a roller skating champ in 1978 Chicago who takes to the rink to dance away the melancholia that still hangs over him since the death of his mother. His South Side crew is tops in their hood, but when they get served by the spandex-and-sparkles rink heroes of the neon-blasted North Side roller palace, they declare war on wheels.
Meanwhile, there's a dad (Chi McBride) hiding the shame of his unemployment, a father-and-son collision, an old girlfriend, a new challenge and the bunch of buddies who revive the art of insult humor in every conversation. Can this absurdly overburdened plot be tied up before the obligatory climactic competition?
Of course it can, and with such recycled predictability that you wonder why they bother gumming up the movie with so much of it between the roller dance numbers. Yet even when the buddy banter fails to engage and family melodrama stalls out, director Malcolm D. Lee ("Undercover Brother") revs it back up into a lively little nothing with a bouncy soundtrack and the glitzy roller routines.
The only thing surprising in "Roll Bounce" is that the funky glitter fashions and wall-to-wall disco ballads are neither campy nor played for nostalgia. Apparently there's a fresh generation ready to take this at face value. That, in its own way, is refreshing.
Fox Searchlight says 10 percent of "Roll Bounce's" opening-weekend box-office proceeds will be donated to Hurricane Katrina relief.
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