There are films that change cinema forever.
Citizen Kane revolutionised visual storytelling. Jaws created the modern blockbuster. The Godfather redefined the crime drama.
And then there is Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a film in which a community centre is saved from property developers through the raw, unstoppable power of rotating on a lino floor.
Released in 1984, Breakin’ 2 is less a conventional movie and more a 94-minute outbreak of dancing. Nobody walks anywhere. Nobody enters a room normally. People cartwheel through doors, moonwalk to the shops and communicate important planning information through synchronised pelvic thrusts.
The story follows Kelly, Ozone and Turbo, three dancers who discover that their beloved community centre, Miracles, is under threat from an evil developer.
How do we know he is evil?
Because he wants to build a shopping centre, wears a suit and does not appear to know how to perform a windmill.
This is cinema operating with absolute moral clarity.
Miracles is not merely a community centre. It is apparently the beating heart of the entire neighbourhood, offering dance classes, art, friendship and the sort of healthcare system where serious injuries can be treated by nearby teenagers doing backflips.
When the building needs money, the gang decides to put on a benefit show. This is a charming plan, although the amount required seems likely to exceed what can realistically be raised through leg warmers and aggressive popping.
Fortunately, realism was escorted from the premises approximately four minutes into the film.
The plot is mostly an administrative inconvenience between dance sequences. Every time a character attempts to discuss money, relationships or municipal redevelopment, somebody arrives with a boombox and the entire street becomes a Broadway production.
At one point, Turbo goes to hospital after he falls down some stairs in a scene with the most unconvincing stuntman double. In an ordinary film, this might lead to a tense recovery scene. In Breakin’ 2, the hospital immediately erupts into a dance number involving patients, nurses and medical equipment.
It is difficult to imagine the Care Quality Commission approving this.
A man on crutches starts performing choreography. Patients fling themselves across corridors. Nurses abandon their duties to join a funk routine. Somewhere, a consultant is presumably trying to explain that the cardiac ward is not technically zoned for breakdancing.
The film’s finest sequence, however, also belongs to Turbo, played by Michael Chambers, who dances around his bedroom so intensely that gravity becomes embarrassed and leaves.
Turbo slides up walls, spins across the ceiling and briefly appears to be living inside a washing machine. It is one of the greatest scenes ever committed to film, mostly because nobody explains it.
Is Turbo dreaming?
Is the room rotating?
Has the entire apartment block become untethered from Earth?
The film does not care. Turbo is dancing on the ceiling and you will accept it.
Lucinda Dickey returns as Kelly, whose character arc mainly involves choosing between her respectable dance career and hanging around with Ozone wearing several belts at once.
Ozone, played by Adolfo “Shabba-Doo” Quiñones, has the commanding presence of a man who has never encountered a garment he could not cut the sleeves off. He spends much of the film looking intensely concerned about the community centre while dressed like a futuristic pirate attending an aerobics class.
Then there are the villains.
The developers are portrayed as if they plan to replace the community centre with a factory that manufactures sadness. Their primary mistake is assuming local planning regulations will protect them from a coordinated dance attack.
They are wrong.
In Breakin’ 2, dancing is not entertainment. Dancing is legislation.
A well-timed body pop can overturn a demolition order. A headspin can restore public funding. Three men performing the robot can apparently invalidate a legally binding property contract.
By the final act, the neighbourhood has united, the benefit show is underway and everybody has dressed as though fluorescent fabric has recently become compulsory.
The dancing is genuinely brilliant. The choreography is energetic, inventive and performed with total commitment. That sincerity is what makes the film so joyful.
Nobody involved behaves as though any of this is ridiculous.
They believe.
They believe a community can be saved through dance. They believe a hospital corridor should contain more backflips. They believe a man in fingerless gloves can defeat capitalism by spinning on cardboard.
And, honestly, by the end, so do you.
The title itself deserves recognition. “Electric Boogaloo” has become the universal joke sequel subtitle, used whenever anything returns in a louder, sillier and less necessary form.
Tax Return 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Divorce Proceedings 2: Electric Boogaloo.
World War 3: Electric Boogaloo.
Yet the phrase originated here, attached to a film that understood sequels perfectly: repeat everything from the first one, increase the number of dancers and remove any remaining respect for physics.
Is Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo a good film?
That depends on what you believe films are for.
If films should provide nuanced characters, believable dialogue and coherent storytelling, then no.
If films should feature a man dancing sideways across a wall while wearing trousers that appear to have been designed by a highlighter pen, then it may be the greatest achievement in human culture.
It is colourful, ridiculous, relentlessly cheerful and completely immune to embarrassment.
Most films ask you to suspend your disbelief.
Breakin’ 2 grabs your disbelief, throws it onto a sheet of cardboard and makes it spin on its head.
★★★★★
Five electric boogaloos out of five.
