A dance comedy usually becomes a cheap soap opera; however, this Cuban Fury was surprisingly endearing but still gave me a lot of laughter. I wonder what make me like this rather than Bring it On Again (2004), Whatever Lola Wants (2009), Make your Move (2013)or Step Up All In (2014) .
It had a formulaic plot, which was extremely predictable. It had
some cool moves especially in the car park, so cool that it was hard
to convince yourself that it's an oversized who had just picked up
dance for a short while although he had been good long time ago. It
had a nasty and mean colleague, who was a typical someone you could
find in any high school drama. It had an ordinary engineer falling
for his new hot boss, which was not a relationship not quite
appropriate in the office. It had a final dance scene which was about
a competition. SO, it just looked like any other dance movie. BUT
it's much better than them, why?I guess, first, from the very first beginning, no one tries to do anything spectacular. Even the competition was not planned, they did not practice hard for months in order to be the Salsa King. They are just ordinary people who work every day and would like some happy hour after a long day. You feel like they're you.
Second, it did not try to convince you to commit yourself fully in
order to achieve something really great. He went up and down, he
tried and gave up and came back again. During which his friends were
not lecturing him on what he should or should not do. No pushing, no
forcing. But he thought he liked her enough to learn Salsa again,
just to let him have an excuse to ask her out. Doesn't that sound
familiar? Have you had the same story?
Third, the dancing was made believable. It's not a self-taught
dancer winning a big game, it's a lack-of-practice who used to dance
picking up dancing again, he worked hard to catch up with the
competitor (in terms of pursuing the crash, not in the dance comp),
quite amazing progress I must say, but it's really believable as I
saw real life examples in our competitions. Here, it's clever that it
never mentioned if his partner gave up dancing or not, but since she
did well in the comp let’s assume she hadn't. And the best part I
liked was the fact that they did not win, because it wasn't fair to
all the ones who trained themselves really hard.
Cuban Fury is a loving one, it tells normal people's simple story. No big ambitions in terms of dancing, as for most people it is a pastime, winning or not does not matter, the positive attitude matters more.