‘Dancing ’ is time of your life you’ll never get back
Amazon. iTunes. YouTube. Those are just some of the places where you can watch the original Dirty Dancing, the muchloved 1987 musical starring Jennifer Grey as the shy, smart Baby and Patrick Swayze as Johnny, the charismatic, hunky dancer who gives her the time of her life. Or, if you prefer, just sit in a dark room and hum (I’ve Had) The Time of
My Life to yourself — which would still be a better choice than watching the miscast, misbegotten remake of Dirty Dancing (8 ET/PT, out of four) ★★✩✩ ABC is trying to foist on you Wednesday night. No matter how badly you sing, you can’t be as tone deaf as this movie.
Set in the Catskills in the summer of 1963, the original Dancing is simplicity itself: Girl meets boy; boy teaches girl how to dance, among other things; girl leaves camp happier, wiser and with some killer moves. It may not be the deepest story ever told, but it had energy, grace and two wellmatched, magnetic leads. And underneath the spell of summer love, it was about something: Baby’s blossoming mirrored the cultural and social changes happening in the world around her, as expressed by the contrast between ballroom twirls and soulful “dirty dancing.”
For a remake of the story to work, you need two stars who can sell Baby’s transformation into Johnny’s dance partner, as Grey and Swayze could. And because the movie uses dance as a metaphor for sex — when it isn’t just using sex — you need two stars with enough onscreen chemistry to sell the wish-fulfillment romance, as Grey and Swayze did.
What you get instead is Abigail Breslin, a talented actress who does not learn to dance, paired with Colt Prattes, a handsome dancer who has not learned to act. To say they have no onscreen chemistry is to minimize the problem: You actively want to get Baby away from him. He sulks throughout, and she spends much of the film looking ill at ease, as uncomfortable doing the vastly simplified routine at the end, when the transformed Baby and her big lift are supposed to steal the show, as she is at the beginning. Honestly, when that clunky climactic number finishes, you may feel the need to rewatch the original as a choreographic cleanse.
To be fair, even Grey and Swayze would have had trouble lifting the bloated, leaden mélange cooked up here by Ameri
can Horror Story writer Jessica Sharzer and Australian TV director Wayne Blair, who have removed all sense of place while drastically padding the film’s length. Katey Sagal’s on-theprowl divorcée now gets a number, Fever (one of a handful of old/new songs unnecessarily shoehorned into the score). Mod
ern Family’s Sarah Hyland, as Baby’s older sister, not only gets a song, she gets turned into a budding civil-rights activist. Count your blessings that Baby didn’t have another sibling; the movie might have run another hour.
Worst, however, is the torturous detour into the crumbling marriage of Baby’s parents, played by Debra Messing and Bruce Greenwood. And after all that wasted suffering, all they need to restore wedded bliss is a boat ride and two equally indifferent versions of They Can’t
Take That Away From Me. A song introduced, by the way, in the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers classic Shall We Dance. Which is available on Amazon, YouTube and iTunes.