Average Rating: 4.2/10
Reviews Counted: 18
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 14
Cheap, predictable, formulaic and unimaginative generic dance film. Comes across as Showgirls for simpleton teens, but with much less flesh on show.
Release Date: Aug 8, 2008 Wide
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Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 12,682
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Grindhouse star Mary Elizabeth Winstead headlines the dance-themed picture Make It Happen -- a bleak drama about a small-town girl who migrates to the Windy City, where she hopes to build a career as a respected dancer. Instead, her life spirals hopelessly downward and she ends up working at a burlesque club to pay the bills and support herself. Scribe Duane Adler -- known for such dance-themed pictures as Step Up and Save the Last Dance -- authored the script; Darren Grant (Diary of a Mad Black
Aug 8, 2008 Wide
Dec 9, 2008
The Weinstein Co./MGM
All Critics (19) | Fresh (4) | Rotten (15) | DVD (1)
Another dance movie this year? Seriously, where the heck do they keep coming from?
...yet another tedious inspirational tale revolving around a would-be dancer's efforts at transcending her wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing to become a professional hoofer.
We know the trajectory, it's a question of how brightly the rocket burns and how interested we are in the astronauts aboard this dance missile from small town Indiana to Chicago Big Time Dance School
This film's limp retelling of the against-all-odds cliche just doesn't bump, grind or sweat enough to make it happen.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead [has] star quality.
It's hard to dislike all these urban musicals aimed at teenage girls, and even harder to tell them apart.
So predictable that you know exactly what's going to happen at any given minute.
Then you wait for the moment one of the regular girls gets injured, the hostess has to find a replacement and... the rest you know.
The film should have been called Rehash Dance, because it is Flashdance without any new ideas.
It's all just filler between the dance scenes, which are admittedly fun. Think Pussycat Dolls with slightly more clothes on. Unrepentantly formulaic, but enjoyable all the same.
This awesomely unambitious film has all the depth of a Pepsi ad.
Its just as cheesy and just as icky, but calamitously fails to offer any high-octane dance to ease the pain.
It could be a contemporary take on classic backstage musicals. Or it could be the end of the cinematic arts as we know them.
There's dancing, there's emotion, there's an earnestly cheesy inspirational storyline, there's nothing you won't have seen before.
Despite boundless energy and some surprisingly artful photography, 'Make it Happen' is never more than product. Cheap, abysmally scripted and utterly soulless.
The directing's lazy, the love interest is a smarmy douche and the dialogue is flatter than Winstead's toned tummy.
The story may be predictable but Winstead infuses every moment with an amazing amount of charm.
In short, this is a watchable dance movie and Winstead's performance just about compensates for the generally poor direction.
Awesome and spectable dance sequences I ever saw. This dance perform movie is familiar as Flashdance meets Save the Last Dance. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is absolutely amazing in this film. Whilst most actresses would be quite happy to let a stand-in do all the difficult dance sequences, Winstead insisted that she be the
January 1, 2009
Super Reviewer
It was no surprise that, throughout Make It Happen's 80-minutes duration, one would find this latest dance flick (helmed by occasional music director, Darren Grant) riddled with the most tiresome and obnoxious clichés that the genre could offer across its existence. The movie seems to be borrowing each scene from
March 1, 2009Super Reviewer
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