1039. Flashdance (1983)

Starring: Jennifer Beals, Michael Nouri, Lilia Skala

Director: Adrian Lyne

Running Time: 98 mins

Flashdance is an American film about a young woman who works in a steel mill but dreams of being a professional dancer, despite having never gone to dance school. However, after she meets a new man, her life is changed forever.

This is quite simply one of the most tedious and annoying films I’ve ever had to sit through. It’s got such a dull, generic story, with characters that are impossible to care about, below-par performances across the board and excessively long and boring dance and montage sequences.

However, there is one positive to this film, so let’s kick off on the bright side. It’s got a pretty cool soundtrack. From the iconic ‘What A Feeling!’ to ‘Gloria’ and everything in between, this is actually quite nice if you’re listening to it on an album.

The positives stop there. Now, the worst thing about this film by a mile is the fact that it’s simply so boring. I’ve seen chick flicks like Dirty Dancing and even Bend It Like Beckham that make the stupid Cinderella story relatively interesting, but this is just so tedious and generic a plot that it’s almost impossible to keep your attention.

It would have helped there had been some characters that were easier to relate to, but no, this film can’t even do that right. Everyone in this is just a simple, one-dimensional persona who doesn’t have any sort of interesting background to them, and due to the fact that the performances are so poor as well, this is an even less interesting film to follow.

One of the more important things about this movie is that it inspired one of the new popular film editing techniques during the 1980s, which is presenting scenes like music videos to make them all the more poppy and cool.

That did work in some better films later on in the 80s, but here, it’s one of the worst things you’ll ever see. There are countless dance and music montages in this film, and each and every one of them is more boring than the last. They go on for ages, and they tell so little extra about the story that they’re simply irrelevant.

Overall, this gets a 3.5 from me, because it’s got such a dull and generic plot with bad characterisation, poor performances and annoying editing techniques that it made a simple 98-minute movie feel like absolutely forever.