4 out of 10
 

Honey, played by Jessica Alba, the cloned heroine in Dark Angel, has amazing talent when it comes to hipo hop dance. Honey works at a bar and her and her best friend lay down the moves on the dance floor after her shift. She also works at a record store and teaches a dance class in a rundown hood of the big apple, all the while finding time to goto audtions for the countless rap/hip-hop videos that proliferate faster than Whinny The Pooh can get to the bottom of a honey pot. All this changes when some lackey of a record exec and director films her at the club and she gets called up to be a dancer on some talentless hacks video, oh wait, that describes that whole industrym my mistake. It does not take her long to become the actual coreagrapher on several of these masterpieces of rubbish. But wait, all this good fortune must come at a price, and every plot needs a villain or antaganost, unless it is pornography. The antagonist turns out to be none other than the music video director that discovered her. He makes some advances at some uppity exclusive industry party, and Honey being the naive little waif that she is thinks that there will be no repurcussions. She ends up being blacklisted and cannot dance in any video to save her life, however though determination, good fortune and the help of kind people she ends up coming out on top.

Along the way Honey meets a gang of local neer-do-wells ranging from 7 years of age to about 15. She ends up teaching many of them in her dance class. The youngest one spends his days on the street as his mommies good for nothing boyfriend is abusive, so Honey tries to make a difference in this little boys life, and that of his brother, who runs with a crew that is into all the black urban stereotypical activities. Honey gets the idea to open up a new community center after the one she teaches at, which is coincedentally run by her mother, is shut down due to beuracratic red tape. This is during the period where she is not able to get any work, so she decides to hold a benefit concert with the kids being the dancers, all coreogrpahed by her to raise the remaining funds to purchase a location.

The acting seems to be lackluster at best, the music, if you can call it that, is well, there. The only redeeming thing about this picture is the cuteness of the little 7 year old and the sheer hotness of Jessica Alba, as well as the dance moves, they are quite impressive. The underlying message is basically work hard, persevere, and good thing will happen do you, what goes around comes around. Oh, and there is also a compulsary mother-daughter disagreement as her mother wishes she would take up ballet and drop the hip-hop as it will not get you the places ballet can. DUH! Ballet gets you to grand scale theatres with rich people wearing accessories worth more than the cost of the production you are starring in, and hip-hop gets you to night clubs with drigs and lots of bling-bling and some guns and shooting, and if you are a woman, you are gyrating in the background, an object to be admired and fondled and posessed. But then again, this is just my bias against rap/hip-hop.