My Review of "Break"

Break is a French movie that came out back in 2018. Initially I thought this was going to be a breakdance movie because of the name and the fact they mentioned that there was some sort of bboy battle. This was kind of a trojan horse to lead me to this movie. It is hardly a breakdance movie but it's not an entirely terrible movie either.

The movie starts off with the main character Lucie and her dance partner Julien. They are doing a dance number on the side of an abandoned building of some sort. It looks as though they are floating when they're gracefully flying in the air. Truthfully, it's a pretty breathtaking shot.

Unfortunately with this stunning number comes a disastrous incident. Lucie's harness accidentally gets loosened and she plummets to the ground. I particularly have a big issue with the scenes after the accident. She fell from a pretty high building with no safety precautions to save her. It was a miracle that she didn't break any bones in her body let alone a severe concussion. In this movie, it looks like Lucie walks away from the accident with some minor bumps and bruises on her body. There's absolutely no way she could have recovered so fast from such an extreme accident.

To get the movie going I had to bite my tongue and let it do what it had to do. While Lucie was in the hospital she somehow recognized a strange man in her room. She assumed it was her biological father even though she's never met or seen this father ever in her life. She asks her mother but her mother doesn't really give her any real answers so she investigates.

After some investigations she is led to some hotel on the wrong side of the city. She pretty much uses Julien as an excuse so that she can go investigate further. Fortunately for Lucie, her hunch was correct but her investigations brought her more than she expected. She meets this guy named Vincent at this hotel. He basically works there but he's got incredible dance skills himself. There's this mystery to him because he doesn't want to dance anymore.

Vincent does however know the ins and outs to the street dance culture. He introduces Lucie to all of his old dance colleagues. They all agree to help train her in 3 months for a gigantic dance audition. I know, how are you going to learn years of dedication in 3 months? A lot of this movie doesn't make sense but you just go with it.

The whole movie surrounds her training for this huge audition and building her relationship with her estranged father while building a relationship with Vincent. It's a lot for one person to do and everything is pretty much done in a pretty package.

We learn about how each of the characters deals with loss and how they're making amends for their losses. Each one of them has a loss just that some of the losses are only revealed closer to the end of the movie. Those characters don't really have much time to explain their journey to redemption it's kind of rushed and tidied up by the end.

With all of this going on you can tell that there's a lot of inconsistent flow to this movie. Some of the movie seems like it's really rushed faster than it should have been and some of it is drawn out. They may have packed a little too much content into this one small movie.

The dance numbers are very entertaining though. I particularly liked the end dance scene. The audition dance scenes are very nice and actually make a lot of sense to us as the viewer but I get a sense that the interviewer for these auditions must have been confused. Us viewers have total context of what they're trying to convey and it's nice but the interviewers have no idea. Still the end scene with the video display was done quite well. It's too bad the scene was quite short.

Overall, I was able to enjoy this movie despite the fact I felt duped to believe that there would be more breakdancing in the movie. It was false advertising but the movie wasn't all that bad if you don't take the pacing issues into consideration. I would have to give this movie a 5.5 out of 10. I give it extra points because some of the dance scenes were done very nicely. Next time pay attention to details in the story!