ABCD 2 review

Review: - A dance movie needs to electrify, thats missing in this movie.

Rating: 2.5/5

Cast : Varun Dhawan, Shraddha Kapoor, Prabhudeva, Lauren Gottlieb, Raghav Juyal
Director : Remo D’Souza

Remo D’Souza’s latest, ABCD 2, suffers from a strange problem — it’s let down by its very raison d'être: dance.

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ABCD 2 is not good as expected. For a film revolving around a hip hop dance championship, one expects actors to break into twists regularly, but ABCD 2’s many and needlessly frequent dance sequences make it less of a film and more of a bunch of loosely-strung music videos that can’t tell a compelling story. Worse, they end up inflating the film’s runtime: 155 minutes feels at least 30 minutes more than it actually is or needs to be.

An still from ABCD 2

Still, ABCD 2 is a much-improved effort than its prequel. This one reverberates with genuine love for the art form, as evidenced by well-choreographed dance numbers aplenty. The initial chemistry between Suresh and his mentor-to-be, Vishnu (Prabhudeva), even though half-baked, is passably funny. Dhawan and Kapoor’s relationship doesn’t follow the tropes of mainstream Bollywood romance: they get together only by the end of the film.

Based on the true story of Suresh Mukund and Vernon Montero's Fictitious Group, which made it to the finals of the 2012 World Hip Hop Championship, ABCD 2 had a chance to say something important: about ambitions and the price people pay for them, about carving identities through something that’s typically considered frivolous, about coming to terms with lost pride. But ABCD 2 couldn’t hear these stories. You wonder why. Maybe we do know the answer: The sound from the box office cash register must have been quite deafening.