While watching the new dance competition film Work It (available on Netflix August 7), my viewing partner and I tried to come up with an appropriate alternate title for the film. Bring the Perfect Dance was the best we could manage, Frankensteining together Work It’s most obvious, uh, references: cheerleading film Bring It On; the mortifying 2001 artifact Save the Last Dance; and of course the more recent Pitch Perfect films, about college a cappella groups doing battle.
Work It, from director Laura Terruso and writer Alison Peck, shifts the action to high school (so, back to where Bring It On and Save the Last Dance laid their scenes) and gets to moving. The film is about a dance crew competition, as a ragtag bunch of weirdos (I guess) squares off against the cruel hegemony of their school’s reigning squad. The setup is more than familiar, as is pretty much every plot beat that follows. We know that ambitious Duke University hopeful Quinn (Sabrina Carpenter) will somehow be swept up in her school’s dance-mad culture, just as we know that her cynical reasons for joining in—by livening up her extracurricular resumé she hopes to appease a Duke admissions rep—will eventually soften into a deeper, more earnest commitment.