Honey Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)December 5th, 2003
Planet Sick-Boy: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2003 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
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 - PG-13 for drug content and some sexual references
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
