Miss – Jessica Alba, Lil’ Romeo, Mekhi Phifer, David Moscow, and a partridge in a pear tree
I wish this movie were Honey: captured and bottled inside a plastic bear, only to be consumed through digestive processes. No one would then be able to see the dozens of recycled shots. No one would hear the sounds of Jessica Alba’s faux Latina accent – and to make matters worse, she actually is Latina – amidst the post-first-acting-class performances. No one would even smell the DVD player fumes as it spins this crap back and forth, like a record scratching to give it that hip hop flava. Only if the DVD itself could in the process be physically scratched so it would be damaged and no longer viewable. Not that anyone in any household would ever watch this movie for a second time. The DVD is more likely to end up raising the dinner table an eighth of an inch or pile up in the corner of the garage with the endless stacks of AOL CDs.
Honey follows the story of Honey Daniels (Jessica Alba). Honey spends her days working at the local shops and bartending at clubs, but always pursuing her one love: dancing. In the opening scene, our protagonist serves drinks at a “hot” dance club, though the camera shots through the lethargic crowd make it look less like an actual dance club and more like a methadone clinic. Honey is irresistibly attractive, meaning she is someone the audience wants to bone because of her looks or stab because of her utter lack of acting talent. But, because of the PG-13 rating the bone option is not well explored. In the club, some pervert with a camera egregiously videotapes the ladies dancing, surprisingly with no retards jumping in front of the camera screaming, “hi mom” or “girls gone wild, YAY!” Honey, of course, shows us her electric moves, which, if anyone saw Timothy McVeigh’s execution, kind of looks like that.
The next day, the pervert’s video makes it to Michael Ellis (David Moscow), a big-time music video director and producer. Immediately after seeing Honey’s dancing, his mind is thinking only one thing: ‘how do I get up in that?’ Being the sly entrepreneur that he is, he hires Honey as a dancer. She shows up on the set of a music video (apparently without any dance practice or warning of the early call time) and blows away Ellis enough to make her his new star choreographer. It is a dream come true in only one day. Of course, it is just another one of Hollywood’s lies. The only days where we see dreams come true in one day are when we go to weddings and funerals.
Paralleling her neatly packaged professional career is her personal life as a hip-hop dance instructor at a community gym. After leaving the club the first night, she runs into some youths practicing their thugged out “You Got Served” dance moves in the darkened alley behind the club. She invites them to her class. Honey takes exception to the youngest of the group, Raymond (Zachary Williams), and, like every good twenty-something faux-matriarch caring for neglected children, looks after him. Raymond lives with a mother too busy being a stereotype of a poor, black mother to tend to her sons. Through Raymond, Honey connects with Raymond’s older brother, Benny (Lil’ Romeo). Benny is at that impressionable age where he could pursue his easily attainable dream of selling drugs on the corner or dancing with the woman that would give the Queer Eye Fab 5 men a chubby. But like all kids at that latency stage in life, he chooses selling drugs.
Both worlds collide when Ellis allows Honey to involve the kids in a Ginuwine music video. But, because Honey was too busy courting the barber, Chaz (Mekhi Phifer), and not succumbing to Ellis’s advances – which sound surprisingly like a whimpering frat boy who ran out of roofies the night before – the kids lose the opportunity to Honey’s skank, of a rival Katrina (Laurie Ann Gibson). Ellis, of course, is too busy text messaging his peeps on his sidekick to notice that Katrina danced like a zephyr and did not rock me like a hurricane.
Honey is out of a job, and to make matters worse, her gym floods and becomes too expensive to repair. So, Honey puts on a dance benefit concert to raise money for the repairs. Let me spare you the last half hour of this flick and ruin any chances of your interested mind voyaging to Blockbuster and renting this monstrosity: The concert is a hit and Honey saves the gym (which then becomes dedicated to her). Honey gets a job personally training Missy Elliot’s dancers, the boys are finally off the streets, Mekhi Phifer collects his paycheck, and I sit in my living room dumbfounded that I spent 94 minutes of my life watching this rotting sewage.
Bottom Line: I wish this movie were Honey: captured and bottled inside a plastic bear, only to be consumed through digestive processes.
Rating: PG-13 (for drug content and some sexual references)
Running Time: 94 min
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