Chance Pe Dance - Movie Review
Published: March 31, 2010
Starring Shahid Kapoor, Genelia D’Souza
If you want to swoon like a schoolgirl, Chance Pe Dance—a showcase for Shahid Kapoor’s gorgeous physique and dancing prowess—delivers. But if you’re looking for a compelling story that isn’t utterly predictable, it doesn’t.
Kapoor plays Sameer, an aspiring actor in Mumbai. In Bollywood, dancing ability is nearly as important as acting ability, and Kapoor is exceptional at both, but we only see his character’s dancing expertise. In fact, Sameer is so good on the dance floor that he doesn’t make a convincing underdog. Someone who looks and moves like him has the odds stacked in his favor, and his dream is hardly a long shot. In fact, that’s the very premise of the story—that everyone is born with certain gifts that destine them to do certain things, and Sameer has been told his whole life by everyone he meets that he’s sure to be a star. But after three years of struggling, he still hasn’t made it because he lacks showbiz connections. That’s certainly more of a factor in Bollywood, where nepotism is rampant, than it is in Hollywood—in fact, it undoubtedly helped Kapoor’s own career, as both his parents are actors. But Kapoor’s superstar quality bursts through his character to such a degree that it’s impossible to buy him as a dejected failure, no matter how sad his puppy-dog eyes are.
The film fails to follow basic rules of good storytelling. For starters, heroes can’t be passive—they must succeed through their own doing—but Sameer’s success, or lack thereof, is simply a matter of dumb luck. Second, characters must change as the story unfolds. Sameer is immensely talented and convinced of it right from the beginning, and he simply must endure rejection until the world acknowledges his talent in the end. The only thing he learns from the experience is that he was right about himself all along.
His love interest, Tina (Genelia D’Souza), is likewise a static character. She’s a film choreographer, who oddly barely dances in the film, and from what little she does, it’s obvious why it was kept to a minimum. She meets Sameer at an audition, and with his first sexy dance move, she’s hooked, as any woman with a pulse would be. After that, he reels her in with little effort. She believes in him from the start and her faith is unsurprisingly vindicated.
Halfway through the film, the story starts to go in an interesting direction when the broke Sameer reluctantly takes a job teaching dance classes at an elementary school, but the subplot turns out to be a pointless detour on his path to inevitable stardom.
Chance Pe Dance is rated Skip.
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