Battle of the Year

Benson Lee made the documentary Planet B-Boy in 2007, about the international breaking competition Battle of the Year and the crews preparing for it. This film is an attempt to retell the same competition as fiction. Josh Holloway plays a former coach charged with assembling a dream team for a contest America has not won in years, with Chris Brown, Laz Alonso and Josh Peck in the cast. The problem is in the conversion. The documentary drew its force from the dancers' actual lives; the fiction version reduces those to sports movie beats. Worse is how the dance is cut: rapid editing and split screens break long routines into unreadable fragments and render invisible the one real asset the film has, which is movement. It opened on 20 September 2013, took sixteen and a half million dollars against a twenty million dollar budget, and was badly received. Who it is for: breaking enthusiasts who do not mind the genre's templates. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to watch the dancing whole; seek out the documentary, Planet B-Boy, instead.