Wonderfully Horrible Netflix Instant Films: “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”

There is a moment when something cool turns lame. I call it the coolness event horizon. It's usually the instant that your parents or some old Hollywood D-bag learns of something's existence. Think about how much less cool Facebook or Twitter became when your auntie Jane signed on. The moment breakdancing stopped being cool, (at least for a little while), was when Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo was greenlit. Breakdancing and its iterations had grown out of the burgeoning hip hop b-boy culture in New York in the 1970's. Kids in the Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn had developed complex choreographed dance moves to hard beats, disco grooves, and much discussion of sucker MCs. But, like all things cool and awesome, it will eventually get ruined by the uptight and lame seeking to capitalize off it. And no one knew how to do that better than the epically craptactular producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.

The plot of Breakin' 2 picks up where Breakin' left off. The first film was goofy, but fun. A young jazz dancer named Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) befriends two breakdancers Ozone (Adolpho 'Shabba-Doo' Quiñones) and Turbo (Michael 'Boogaloo Shrimp' Chambers) and learns to joins their crew in order to defeat a rival crew all while combating the stigma of street dance. It was still gritty and had some seriously amazing dance scenes. But Breakin' 2 has a much less of a plot. The three dancers put on a show to save a failing community center. It was like the plot of an old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie but much less well done. Golan and Globus figured that they could just shoot a lot of breakdancing and it would all be OK. It wasn't.

What's strange is that it had the same actors, the same team, and similar music and it just...didn't work. I'm not saying that Breakin', Krush Groove, or Beat Street are great films but they are look like Citizen Kane compared to Electric Boogaloo. It really felt pandering, like the truly cynical ploy to make money that it was. But there is a few genuinely awesome dance sequences in the film. Even Golan and Globus couldn't rob the dancers of their talent...even though they tried really hard. I recommend watching it though. No, it's not good. But it is at times entertaining and serves as cautionary tale of what happens when Hollywood comes to exploit.