THE MOVIE

Some of the breakdancing in B-Girl.

I'll start off this review by admitting that, as a rule, I generally don't get much enjoyment from movies that focus on dancing (including Stomp The Yard and Save The Last Dance) so I was a little lukewarm to watching this latest release, B-Girl. Still, if there are good characters, a bit of fun and great music I can still find the genre enjoyable, so with my wife being keen to check out B-Girl I gave the disc a spin.

So what about the storyline? Well B-Girl tells the story of Angel (Jules Urich) a b-girl who is never more alive than when she's dancing – out on the floor, the star of the circle. However, a brutal attack drives her from her home in Brooklyn and the across the country to Los Angeles. She is isolated in this new city with no friends and no community, only her mother, Gabby (Missy Yager), who is terrified that dancing will destroy Angel again. Angel is paralyzed by fear but lost without her dancing.

Angel is played by real-life b-girl Jules Urich.

Now don't get me wrong some of the breakdancing in this movie is pretty impressive, no doubt about it, it's just a shame that the entire movie and storyline is so poorly constructed and generic that you really don't want to hang around to wait for the good scenes. In terms of the storyline, well you know the drill; dancing girl, gets injured, starts to make comeback, meets nice boy, meets bitchy rival girl (whom for some reason becomes friends when she realises who the new white girl is), big competition coming up... guess the result.

To be honest few of the actors in the movie did much for me and even the lead Jules Urich didn't really light up the screen as I would have hoped. It's also pretty obvious that she doesn't have the same level of breakdancing skills as the other actors in the movies - or if she does, the director did a terrible job of showing it. I also had to crack up with the final championships, the crowd around the dance floor is lucky to be 2 people deep for the most part. A budget movie, shot on a budget, which can't even get a group of drunks to stand in a room and cheer. Oh dear...

I'm pretty sure that this is one of the worst movies I've seen since I started to review Blu-Ray discs. The only reason it gets a couple of marks is for the jaw-dropping final breakdancing battle which had me glued to the screen for 10 minutes or so. As I mentioned above I really don't get much out of this genre, but I still know predictable, poorly acted and directed shit when I see it.

The final dance battle is spectacular.

VIDEO
It takes about 4 seconds to realise that this films isn't a glossy Hollywood styled production. In fact there is a massive amount of film grain, noise, and blurriness about the image. I don't know what this film was actually shot in however it would be a safe bet to guess 16mm film stock was used. In any case, while the transfer, provided via AVC MPEG-4 codec at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, is probably as good as one could expect - and the bitrate hovers from single digits up to somewhere in the high 20Mbps'. This is not demo material, not even close, and wouldn't even rate as a good looking movie on DVD, although there is, of course, a higher resolution on Blu-Ray.

AUDIO
B-Girl has two audio tracks on the disc - a Linear PCM 2.0 track encoded at 2.3Mbps which sounds pretty impressive in its own right, but is obviously limited to the front speakers. The second audio track is a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (24-bit/48Khz) which adds a little more fidelity to the track, and pushes a little bit of audio to the surround sound channels, but overall this whole movie sounds very flat - almost like it was originally created for 2 channel audio. I would have expected this movie to really crank the music, but it was left, well, meh...

Missy Yager is solid in B-Girl.

There are no subtitle tracks on the B-Girl Blu-Ray which will hopefully save some people from seeing this movie.

EXTRAS
There are a couple of extras on this disc, with somewhat questionable quality.

Lady Jules - Behind the B-Girl (6:45/HD): A brief interview with the leading actress in this movie in which she discusses entering breakdancing battles.

Wesley Jonathon - Carlos (6:45/HD): Here we have a very short interview with Wesley in which he discusses the movie.

B-Boy profiles - Flipz, Steelo, Remedy (10:52/HD): This featurette profiles three of the breakdancers in the movie and gives a little of their background story.

The Battle (5:40/HD): This featurette looks at creating the final battle in the movie including showcasing each person's abilities.

To be honest B-Girl isn't a great movie.

Bloopers (5:26/HD): It's the required blooper reel with fluffed lines and goofs from the set while filming.

Dance Auditions (7:10/HD): The title says it all really as this video shows off the auditions the dancers went through to get their parts.

OVERALL
Oh dear... How I struggled to get through this movie. The less said about this entire release the better really. Avoid B-Girl like the plague unless you're only interested in a pretty decent 10 minute breakdancing battle at the end.

Review By: Dave Warner

THE MOVIE	3/10
THE VIDEO	5/10
THE AUDIO	5/10
THE EXTRAS	3/10
OVERALL	4/10