| HONEY |
 2003 - USADirector: Billie Woodruff - Reviewed by Eric
Alright, that's long enough. Now let me explain why Honey sucked. First of all, I know nobody is expecting this movie to be good. Not even I expected it to be anything more than a hilariously bad combination of Flashdance, Showgirls, and Glitter. Interestingly, the actual movie plays more similarly to Showgirls than anything else. Except that Showgirls is fun to watch, and Honey left my date and I unable and uneager to even speak to each other about the horror we had just witnessed. Was it bad? Of course. Was it funny? Yes, actually. Is it worth seeing just to laugh at it? I'm going to give the same advice I did when I reviewed The Core: Yes, if you're drunk, and with plenty of friends. Jessica Alba plays Honey, a young woman who lives in the ghetto and loves to dance at the local club where she bartends. Honey dreams of making it as a hip hop dancer, despite her mother's insistence that this is in fact a stupid dream and that Honey should just go to ballet school and "see all the beauty the world has to offer," whatever that means. Honey finally gets her break when she is approached by music video director Michael Ellis (David Moscow) after he sees her dancing in the club, and she quickly makes a name for herself as a choreographer in the music video industry. When Michael hits on her and gets rejected, he blackballs her and she is shut out of the industry. How will Honey raise the money to open her own dance studio now? Alba gives a performance that will go down in film history as the only thing that ever made Elizabeth Berkley look talented by comparison. Her line readings are so astoundingly bad, from the first frame of the film to the very last, there were times when my jaw actually dropped. I can't stress this enough. The woman has one (ONE) facial expression, and tries to talk "street" in a voice that sounds like a kindergarten teacher's. For Honey, no words end in the letter "r"—words like "centah," "directah," and "flavah" come out of her mouth and the baby Jesus cries tears of blood. I've never heard less convincing "street" in my life. Dr. Ruth would have given more convincing renditions of lines like, "Your moves are hot. I like your flavah. They ain't wack." It's as if someone phonetically transcribed someone actually talking street, then gave them to Alba, who enunciates each word clearly and with a sunny yet wooden tone. Really, I could go on for years about Alba's ineptitude as an actress, but let's move on. Actually, let's not. Jessica Alba sucks, y'all. Okay, now let's move on. Honey's best friend Gina (Joy Bryant) also sucks, y'all. She exists only to be sassy, wear tube tops that I'm not sure cover her nipples, and provide Honey with such sparkling bits of career wisdom as, "Sometimes, you have to go in the back door to get in the front door." Are she and Honey even talking about the same thing? You decide. The screenplay is as lazy as it gets. Honey's friends and family perform their functions as plot devices and then disappear until the end of the film, where everyone is suddenly happy and has no problems. This movie is about as complex as a (bad) after-school special, or a made-for-Nickelodeon TV movie. Alba should be put into a rocket ship and flown into the sun. Even Honey's choreography sucks, dude. This movie cannot win. So, Honey gets one slice because, well, it is amusing in its awfulness. But not in a theater. Like The Core, rent this one, call your friends over, and talk through the whole damn thing. I believe that could be a night to remember. |
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Before we begin, let us first have a moment of silence in honor of the
part of my soul that died after seeing this movie.
