Honeyis one of those movies you will see, swear you've seen before in several other guises and incarnations, then immediately forget you ever saw to begin with. Its story, about a would-be dancer trying to plot her escape from mean streets (or mean movie sets and back lots), has been told countless times, usually in films starring John Travolta or Jennifer Beals...or Kevin Bacon, if you feel compelled to add Footlooseto the estimable genre of movies about people who just gotta dance! The entire enterprise feels decidedly retro; were it not for the bumpin' soundtrack assembled on the hip-hop factory line, you might mistake this for something made for the cut-out bins of 1978 or 1983 or 1991. Why it exists at all is a mystery for the ages. Certainly it's not because there was an audience clamoring for a Jessica Alba star vehicle; nobody watched her on Dark Angel for two years, and that was free.
Hard to stand: Jessica Alba is static in Honey.
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Alba's the latest in a long line of long legs to mistake dancing lessons for acting lessons -- though, to be fair, she did once study with David Mamet and William H. Macy. She works her abs off as Honey, a bartender by night and record-store clerk by day who has the mighty aspirations of working in the music-video biz as a choreographer. And if you can root for that in your movie protagonist, well, you'll pretty much cheer for anything. Would that Missy Elliott, who has charisma to burn and smoke, had been cast in the lead; she's teased in the credits but appears far too late in the film to redeem it.
Ah, but Honey has her, ahem, sweet side. When not picking up dance moves from asphalt basketballers -- director Bille Woodruff, maker of videos for, among others, Britney Spears and OutKast, finds big drama in Honey's dancer's block -- she's teaching dance moves to the kids at the local rec center, which is run by her mother (Lonette McKee, once a Spike Lee regular, now relegated to furrowing brows). Her class, multi-culti and decked out in designer threads, looks like something out of an American Idolcasting call; you keep expecting a Broadway producer to stumble in and sign them up for a touring production of Rent.
Among the local toughs she convinces to join her class is Benny (Lil' Romeo), whom she meets one night outside a club bustin' breakdance moves in an alley, which lends a decidedly Electric Boogaloovibe to the proceedings. Benny at first thinks Honey a fake and a fraud; she thinks he's just afraid of not looking tough in front of his little brother and the drug dealer for whom he works on the side. It's Benny who inspires Honey to buy a dilapidated warehouse and turn it into a dance studio for the neighborhood, which she can't afford until she puts on a show at an abandoned church. (Andy Hardy just called; he wants his movie back.)
Honeywill satisfy those who found Flashdance, or the J.Lo video it inspired, too hard to follow. On the twentieth anniversary of Flashdance's release, Honey plays like a remake, down to its protagonist's involvement with a moneyed boss -- though in this case the boss in question, video director Michael Ellis (David Moscow, not as cute as when he was little Tom Hanks in Big), goes from prince to prick for no reason other than to advance a stalled plot. So Honey, plotted like an after-school special, adds a second love interest: Mekhi Phifer's barber-shop-owning Chaz, who eschewed the thug life for the chance to cut heads in the old neighborhood.
If Flashdanceheralded the dawn of cinema as music-video montage, Honeyboils down the formula to its most base elements and winds up as little more than an assemblage of clips for Jadakiss, Ginuwine and other hip-hop chart-toppers connected by its tattered tale as loosely as a pair of Triple 5 Soul baggy jeans. Even the scenes set outside the soundstages look framed and lit and soundtracked to resemble a music video, to the point that for a good half hour you can't tell what's going on, who's related to whom and what they're saying over the din of boomboomboom coming out of a nightclub's P.A. system. (Not that it matters much; the dialogue could have been recorded in Esperanto and the audience still could have kept up.) Honeyexists solely to sell a soundtrack; the movie, like most made for teens, is well beside the point.
