ABC's "Dirty Dancing" Remake is Wildly Misjudged | TV/Streaming
Elsewhere the performances induce whiplash. "Modern Family's" Sarah Hyland is … in the movie. Bruce Greenwood ably takes over for Jerry Orbach as Baby's father but they've unfortunately expanded the part, giving him a few songs and a failing marriage to a harried-looking Debra Messing. Messing is not only an inadequate replacement for Kelly Bishop but she also lacks Greenwood's warmth and grace. In fact, Greenwood's Jake Houseman is the best thing about the movie until the singing starts. As his life falls apart he sits down at a piano to moan a mournful ballad and out comes a voice like Michael Bolton's, thanks to a metric ton of auto-tuning hammering his vocals into shape. Greenwood's dignity is defeated by the impostor's voice issuing from his mouth. It falls to Tony Roberts and Billy Dee Williams, playing resort staff, to reground the film after that moment, as no one else in the cast is up to the task. Williams has only to smile from behind a pair of cheaters and a newspaper and his charisma temporarily irons out the film’s many issues. Roberts is clearly having a ball playing the villain, relishing every second of his performance like the old school theater actor he is.
Director Wayne Blair, on whose shoulders the above failures ought to be placed, lights every corner of the set, as afraid of shadows as he is of nuance. Every room is a little too big and every actor is a little too far away from the camera, as in a multi-camera sitcom. Blair has no eye for the dancing, which is his most lethal failing. He has no sense of how to film bodies, the space needed to ensure we see the impressive physicality of each performer, no sense of how to communicate the sensual thrill of two people touching. Blair may well be trying to shoot around the lackluster choreography, which also fails the performers at every turn. The dancers may as well be rogue parade floats accidentally smacking into each other. The music direction is similarly ghastly. Slick, soulless covers of 60s and 80s pop and ballads stumble around like reanimated corpses on the soundtrack.
That's all bad enough, but the final 15 minutes detonate a nuclear bomb of misbegotten ambition in the viewer's brain. It dares you to reconsider your opinion of every poorly staged number and overacted monologue. Prattes' constipated Johnny Castle storms the dance hall for his closing performance, walks over to the table where Baby and her family sit, and delivers the now iconic line that lodged "Dirty Dancing" into popular cinematic imagination. His somnambulant read of "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" spurts from his lips like a mouthful of water he'd forgotten to swallow. A film which had been held together with hope and a prayer until this point, finally falls apart. Then perversely, it keeps going.
