Battle of the Year Reviews

A film steeped in the streetwise hip-hop culture should have an edge, but Battle of the Year is safer and softer than Drake's last album.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

There's not nearly enough quality material to make Battle of the Year recommendable to anyone other than the most hard-core of dance fanatics.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5

Battle of the Year is no Step Up 3D. But then, what is?

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/10

The raison d'être of popping-and-locking scenes is trumped by tired team-building bathos, whose flagrancy is anything but conducive to spreading the film's hug-it-out bro-love.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

The miracle of the new 3-D dance film "Battle of the Year" is how it can be so relentlessly boring while there is so much frenetic activity on screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

Destined to please only bad movie buffs desperate for a fix of awful dialogue, blatant product placement, and clunky exposition.

Full Review | Original Score: F

The actual dancing scenes are occasionally electrifying, if far too sparse, but other than that and the welcome sight of co-star Chris Brown getting clocked in the face, the film barely gets off the ground, much less sticks the landing.

Full Review | Original Score: D+

This 3-D spectacle is less the dance movie that's going to make b-boying cool again than a shill for sponsors' gear.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Not badly executed, but not the least bit original either.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Should satisfy the planet of b-boys and girls to whom it thoroughly preaches, while amusing anyone else who simply can't ignore the promise of an all-corn buffet.

Full Review

Fatally frontloaded with endless training montages, awfully written, indifferently acted drama, sports-film platitudes and jaw-dropping product placements that only the hardiest of viewers will make it through to the payoff.

Full Review

A dead-in-the-soul cash grab of a movie set in the competitive world of B-boy dancing that thinks clichés, phony melodrama and product placement can substitute for real storytelling and actual characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/5

The bar for urban-flavoured dance movies has already been set pretty low, but Battle Of The Year effortlessly leans back and limbos on below it.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

its dramatization of a U.S. dream team's journey to the international showcase is leaden with predictable character types and storytelling clichés, neither of which its well-executed but oddly infrequent dance sequences are able to overcome.

Full Review

so familiar that you half expect Julia Stiles and Channing Tatum to show up and start hoofing

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

The movie's inability to showcase its greatest asset, the grace and control of its dancers, is its most conspicuous failing.

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/4

Battle of the Year crams so many clichés into its 109 minutes that you just know it will end with a sports movie freeze-frame. And it does!

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Everything else in this pedestrian dance drama is either absurdly corny or just plain moronic, though the feature does win points for being so earnest with its hopeless pile of clichés.

Full Review | Original Score: C

After months of patient waiting, 2013 has finally produced a movie that's so bad it's good.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10

At the risk of sounding 100, I think it's regrettable this film had to be shot in digital 3-D.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4