Film Reviews

Make It Happen

• Rating:
• Director: Darren Grant
• Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Riley Smith, John Reardon, Tessa Thompson
• Details: US / 90mins / (12A)

In a nutshell, Make It Happen is Step Up 2 feat. Save The Last Dance and How She Move (club mix). Lauryn (Winstead) moves from Indiana to the big smoke to fulfil her dream as a dancer but is rejected by the prestigious Chicago School Of Music And Dance and winds up taking a job as an accountant in a club to make ends meet. While waiting for a break, she hones her skills watching the club's dancers, as romantic interest DJ Russ (Smith) pushes her to believe in herself. Although Make It Happen is a competent movie, it's also bland and formulaic; there are only so many plot variations you can have with this kind of narrative - our financially strapped hero comes to big city to learn that the established dancing community aren't fond of their street style but finally succeeds because they believe in themselves - and Make It Happen struggles for anything resembling originality. Writer Duane Adler is a dab hand at this after penning Step Up 1 & 2, and Save The Last Dance 1 & 2, but his attempt to add some depth to Lauryn (she's an orphan) doesn't ring true. You can't really have your character down in the dumps in one scene and happy-go-lucky the next without one scenario feeling false. Winstead is fine in her first lead but she's lumbered with a character that is just too uninteresting to root for. The fact that the third Step Up, pencilled in for 2010, is in 3-D goes to show that ways of reinventing this sub genre are already on the wane.

Review by Gavin Burke