Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
review by Gregory Avery, 27 February 2004

In stark contrast to people staggering out of showings for The Passion of the Christ (one young woman sat on the floor of the lobby, looking shell-shocked; earlier, an ambulance had arrived at the theater!), folks were tittering gleefully from beginning to end during the mercifully conflict-free Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and the movie's story is set in Cuba near the end of 1958. Sometimes, there are times for films like these.

Katey (Romola Garai), daughter of a well-off American family newly relocated to Havana, decides to compete in a New Year's Eve dance contest, to be held at the Palace (which I initially thought was a reference to the dictator Batista's residence, but which turns out to be a ritzy venue in its own right). Helping her is Javier (Diego Luna), who agrees to partner with her after losing his job as a waiter at a luxury hotel where others of Katey's ilk lie by the pool looking like the type of people the Fidelistas are just waiting to run out of the country. ("This is Cuba. You can do what you want," says one blond, jaded lass played by the ubiquitous January Jones. How's that for sensitivity? Better yet, how's that for dialogue?) Javier takes Katey to a place called "La Rosa Negra,” where people, to paraphrase a line from David Denby's review for the 1987 Dirty Dancing, look like they're trying to do standing-up what most sensible people do lying-down. To show just how much help Katey needs in order to loosen up and dance with the same undulating rhythm as the ocean tide as it comes and goes from the beach (at one point, she and Javier actually rehearse in the tide), Katey is next seen trying to move her hips to a Latin music recording as if she were performing a physical therapy exercise.

Romola Garai also has to act with convincing shocked moral rectitude whenever she hears anyone saying anything that is dreadfully incorrect, but no one could do anything with such miserably uninspired dialogue such as her post-coital line, "I'm so glad to see this here with you." (The revolution, that is.) Diego Luna, a talented actor (Y Tu Mamá También and last year's Open Range), shows unexpected dancing skills, but he turns out to be miscast -- trying very hard to be charming, he ends up looking puckish; then, Patrick Swayze turns up, unbilled, as a "dance instructor" who looks an awful lot like Johnny Castle. (Swayze's face is a little gaunt, but he still moves beautifully.)

Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote the screenplay for and co-produced the 1987 Dirty Dancing, was adamant in insisting that no direct sequel to that film could be made without the participation of all of the talent who helped make the first picture (something which became an impossibility when the director Emile Ardolino passed away in the early Nineties). Looking at this in-name-only tagalong (save for Swayze, there's only an occasional waft of "I Had the Time of My Life" on the soundtrack), you can see why. The plot is so clunky and forced that it seems to have been assembled in a factory -- one moment, Katey's sister gets into a terrible disagreement with her, the next the younger sister is saying how wrong she was to have created a spat and the two make up with alarming alacrity. There's also an American boy vying for Katey's attentions (Jonathan Jackson, who takes off his sunglasses and bats his eyes at Garai over the peachfuzz on his cheeks) -- not only does he give her up to Javier, but helps arrange for them to meet and rehearse for the dance contest. The music doesn't sound like 50s Latin music; the dance scenes have been cut into bits, so we don't even get any of THAT, either. The movie finally descends into utter lunacy around the time when Katey exclaims to her mother (Sela Ward, who, somehow, looks like a cross between Jacqueline Kennedy and Ali MacGraw), "Just because you gave up your passion, why should I?!" Then she goes over to spend the night with Javier and his family -- but she phones her parents to let them know where she is. In the end, she will, presumably, go back to America, while he, presumably, helps build missile bases aimed at the U.S. Paging Terry Southern.

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