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How
do I hate Honey? Let
me count the ways:
1.
The film's poster renders its star completely
unrecognizable. Believe
me, I know – I could spot Jessica Alba in a crowd from, like,
a billion paces. The
poster makes her look more like Sophie Marceau, which may be a
clever attempt to lure in the arthouse crowd as well as the
generally mindless target audience of this stinker.
2.
Honey is a movie about the making of the worst
imaginable kind of uninspired hip-hop videos and was made by a
director responsible for some of the worst imaginable kind of
uninspired hip-hop videos (Bille Woodruff). The irony displayed
here achieves spectacular yet completely unintentional levels.
3.
When it comes to technical quality, Honey ranks
right up there with the sloppiest work of Ed Wood.
Besides the one scene where the camera angles took on an
unfortunate life of their own, there are big sound problems.
This is established early on during a scene in a packed
club with booming, pulsating dance music so sonically creative
that the actors didn't even have to raise their voices to
communicate with one another.
Other scenes feature the glaring absence of ambient
noise, which adds such a realistic quality to any film.
4.
The music? It
won't win any awards, though the scene where the frightened
street urchin directs his sad eyes right into the camera at the
very height of his sad, frightened, street urchinosity just as
the cheesy piano theme from The Young and the Restless is
cued up nearly made me crap my pants.
I seriously thought I was imagining things, in kind of a
bizarre, Martin Tupper-esque kind of way, until everyone else
started to laugh (Honey garnered a number of
unintentional guffaws, in case it's not yet apparent).
5.
The acting – and God help me if this hinders my future
attempts to woo Ms. Alba – is abominable. Alba is armed with a perpetual wide smile that borders on
mildly retarded. Her
sporadic New Yawk accent is sad, but at least it's not as
immediately embarrassing as Lil' Romeo and his attempts to act
all tough. It's
funny to watch little kids try to appear bad-ass, especially
when their testicles have yet to descend.
Missy Elliott clocks in a funny 60-second performance at
the end and is, by leaps and bounds, the sole highlight of Honey.
Writing that last sentence physically hurt me.
It's like saying the best part of your trip to Italy was
dining at the McDonald's in the Milan airport on the way home.
6.
Honey's pacing is atrocious, never giving viewers
any idea how much time passes between scenes.
Alba's character, who is initially employed as a
bartender, a record store clerk and a dance instructor (the
welding scenes were presumably left on the cutting room floor),
becomes the preeminent music video choreographer over the
span of about three scenes.
She literally shoots a video one day and watches it air
the next.
7.
Oh, yeah - the story.
Imagine an amalgamation of those bad breakdance movies
from the early '80s, like Krush Groove, Beat Street,
Breakin', but more specifically Breakin' 2: Electric
Boogaloo (my all-time personal favorite title to
name-check), which was about breakdancers trying to save their
community center. So
is Honey. It's
a lot like Glitter, too, although Glitter was
actually set in the early '80s, and Honey just looks like
it is. It portrays
New York City as the kind of place where even the most insidious
evil can be thwarted by the power of dancing.
Even when said evil sports a Rob Johnson jersey.
Dance is just that powerful, my friends.
| 1:33
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for
drug content and some sexual references |
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