Film: Street Dancer 3D

Director: Remo D’Souza

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Cast: Shraddha Kapoor, Prabhu Deva, Varun Dhawan, Nora Fatehi, Aparshakti Khurana

Street Dancer 3D is a film that celebrates dance as an expression of one’s mind, body, and soul. Despite being based on a loosely developed deliberate plot that revolves around a social message, the Varun Dhawan, Shraddha Kapoor starrer hits the ballpark when it comes to the crux of the film – dance.

This Remo D’Souza directorial opens with a focus not on the central lead but the dancers of the film that hold it. Varun is desperately weaved into the narrative in the first half and settles to suit it better in the second half. His performance feels forced and one-notch higher on the scale of energy than required. At least, in the pre-interval film, he felt unsuited to the terrain he was traversing.

Shraddha Kapoor is introduced with a separate track, and her style, swagger, and moves make her blend well than her male counterpart in the film. Varun is even given a back story to develop on, but he does not give it any personal edginess that would have made his character psychologically complex and fun to unravel as a character. His weakness lies in making everything barefaced and obvious.

Supporting characters like Aparshakti Khurana bring in an element of drama that the film wanted Varun to cover instead.

Varun and Shraddha belong to rival dance groups and battle on to win the ‘Ground Zero’ battle until there is a change of heart in one party to help another. The prize money of the dance battle would go to helping illegal immigrants in London to go back to their countries.

A fairly simple, lack-lustre plot fails to deliver a mark, as the film is not more about the actors as it is about the dancers, and perhaps the only film franchise that celebrates the dancers of the entertainment industry. The dance sequences are vividly shot with an interesting play of space, light, summersaults, and anything innovative. It is solely on the strength of that Street Dancer 3D sails. The choreography is hard and challenging and every time there is a face-off, which obviously in such genres is many, one would want to hold their breath to see that all goes all.

Nora Fatehi is a delight to watch as she amps up the game in the first half to show how difficult it all really is. A surprise face-off battle between her and Shraddha (a girls’ fight that many would enjoy) was something different to watch, at least both were given that much screen-space to dominate as women.

The pace of the film is punctured by its dance and music, both accompanying each other. The dialogues are a bit wayward and barely suit the people who voice them. A simple and direct approach would have been better in that regard.

As audiences, one can go in to enjoy the dances on the remixed Punjabi tracks; Street Dancer 3D is worth every penny in that regard, but more than that everything else takes a backseat. And perhaps, the film could be redeemed on that ground alone that it is primarily a dance film, and nothing more than that.

Rating: 2