We are introduced, in the funniest scene I have watched in a movie theater this calendar year, to hip-hop impresario Dante (Laz Alonso) addressing the board of directors of his multi-media empire with a most grievous concern. The children do not like breaking! And if that most ancient dance, one of the cornerstones of hip-hop culture since its inception, shall fall out of favor in the United States, than surely it's only a matter of time before hip-hop dies out as a major force in the marketplace. "I overheard some kids saying that b-boying is no longer cool" frets Dante with deep gravity, and the whole tenor of the scene suggests that not just his company but the entire American economy rests on finding a way to make the dance popular again, now. Plainly, Americans need to regain our dominance in the art form that we invented before those foreigners took it away from us, goddammit. Success at the international level, giving all American kids something to root for against the French and Germans and those asshole Koreans, will be exactly what it takes to make b-boying wonderfully popular! B-boying, apparently, is soccer.
Dante's first idea is to find his old friend from the early days of the scene, Blake or "WB" (Josh Holloway), a former basketball coach and current alcoholic. Giving Blake a blank check to do whatever he wants is the first step of many on the road to forming an unstoppable crew, the "Dream Team" of American b-boying, and Blake's task is to take the egos, rivalries, and meanness that have for so long condemned the Americans to failing in international competitions of an originally American style, and strip them away, to make a team that is about the betterment of all and not just the showboating of some. If, by this point in the synopsis, you're eagerly wondering whether Blake's newfound sense of purpose and affection for the ragtag crew he's training get him off the hooch, or whether the prickly personalities and distrust among the b-boys, especially talented hot-heads Do Knock (Jon Cruz, who actually dances under the name... Do Knock) and Rooster (noted domestic abuser Chris Brown), will prevent them from gelling as a team and learning to respect each other, then Battle of the Year desperately wants you to go see it right this second, because you are going to eat that shit up with a spoon.
For everyone else, the appeal of Battle of the Year lies almost exclusively in the complete lack of success with which it freshens up the unbelievably musty scenario, or in the helpless, tasteless ways that director Benson Lee inserts references to his own 2007 documentary Planet B-Boy, beatified as the very Gone with the Wind of breaking movies, particularly in the scene where a giddy b-boy fan named Franklyn (Josh Peck) - "Franklyn with a 'Y'", he calls himself, so many times that I was legitimately outraged that he didn't show up under that name in the end credits - forces Blake to stream it from Netflix that very second, to teach the ignorant old man about the current state of the art. Awesomely, at the time of Battle of the Year's long-delayed release (it was pushed a full eight months from January, where it would have at least seemed a little less incongruous), Planet B-Boy was not, in fact, available to stream from Netflix, which makes this incomparably ballsy product placement totally ineffective, in addition to hilariously crass and tacky. But not as tacky as the way that Franklyn with a "Y" first accesses Netflix on his new Sony tablet, do you see how shiny and technically advanced it is? And not nearly as hilarious as the scene where Dante gives all the b-boys a goodie back of presents that elicits the breathless response, "I got a PS Vita!", a sentence never said by any human being ever in such an orgasmic tone of voice.
The goofy melodrama is interspersed, at intervals, by some of the worst dance choreography I have seen in my entire experience of the urban dance subgenre, completely wasting the fact that outside of noted domestic abuser Chris Brown, all of the b-boys are played by actual b-boys (most of them, incidentally, are better actors than noted domestic abuser Chris Brown, though none get such a dramatic Oscarbait scene as his snot-filled weepy farewell); and 3-D helps these dance numbers out not at all, serving only to make them murkier and not to make them in any way visually kinetic. Along the way, a token female (Caity Lotz) is introduced, and even the movie doesn't try to pretend she needs to be there after the initial "I will never ever have sex with any of you" jokes, and the actual Battle of the Year is presented with a level of microscopic arcana that suggests Lee and his screenwriters, Brin Hill and Chris Parker, were unaware that there might be anywhere in the world someone who is not infinitely familiar with the process of scoring professional breakdancing battles.
Through all of this, Holloway - a much better actor than the material, though that's true of almost any actor sober enough to stand on two legs for more than ten seconds at a stretch - attempts to anchor the material with grave, pained looks and barked out lines that are meant to evoke the hundreds of no-nonsense teacher and coach movies over the decades, but married to the fizzy idiocy of the script and the anemic characterisations in which people are given one trait (the gay kid, the young father, the... actually, I think that's all of them), the junky filmmaking, and the uniformly bad acting of every other person onscreen, Holloway's furrowed-brow attempts at gravitas end up playing as campy overreach more than anything, the one Very Serious Actor who doesn't realise he's in a shitty-looking clown show. It's wasted effort on the actor's part, but it's the perfect mordant center for a whirlwind of daft occurrences and strained dialogue and constantly mis-conceived dramatic beats; such earnest bad filmmaking that it becomes one of the most refreshingly silly things I've seen in weeks.
2/10
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