Where to watch Save the Last Dance
1 Star
Sara wants to be a ballerina, but her dreams are cut short by the sudden death of her mother. She moves in with her father, who she has not seen for a long time. He lives on the other side of town, in a predominantly Black neighborhood. She gets transferred to a new school where she is one of the few White students there. She becomes friends with Chenille, and later, falls in love with Chenille’s brother, Derek.
As MTV begins to shutter channels and shrink into cultural obscurity, it’s difficult to convey the popularity of the network during the 1980s-2010s. Arguably, MTV reached its zenith when it launched a film production company, uninspiredly titled MTV Films, to produce a slate of feature films that would appeal to their core demographic. It made sense synergistically from a corporate standpoint—advertise the film on the channel, air the music video tie-in, and add a genre-specific soundtrack—all of which propelled Save the Last Dance into a box-office hit.
All of these peripheral elements mask the fact that Save the Last Dance is a laughably bad film, even terrible in many aspects. The Robbie Greenberg cinematography, which captures the winter-bitten city locations like an Andrew Davis flick, gives the maudlin movie a visual personality. The interracial love story is ludicrous, particularly when compared to Julia. Stiles’s other 2001 film, ‘O,’ is handled with the maturity and complexity of a 16-year-old. Even worse, Sean Patrick Thomas and Julia Stiles are both lead-footed and ungraceful in the dance sequences. Save the Last Dance fails as a ‘dance’ movie, and it miserably fails as a romantic drama, giving it no reason to exist.
Directed by: Thomas Carter
Written by: Duane Adler, Cheryl Edwards
Starring: Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas, Kerry Washington