Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack [2017]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

For a while we were experimenting with the idea of watching the fifth installment in a series in isolation as a bad movie night concept. Yesterday, we did one better with the sixth installment in the "Bring It On" series. But wait! It wasn't just the sixth in the series but also a film made almost a decade after the previous installment, a perfect recipe for badness. And this movie feels cheap. It stars no one except Vivica A. Fox of "Cool Cat Saves The Kids" fame who never leaves a single room and clearly shot all her scenes in a day. Everyone else in the movie is probably a dancer because they certainly aren't actors although at one point a random middle aged man shows up in the background who we all suspected was a camera guy added to the scene to increase the number of people.

The movie does an extremely poor job of establishing its universe. Right from the beginning we are unsure if the cheerleading team is a collegiate team, a professional team, or just some sort of hobby. Either way, the ironically named Rebels are part of some online cheer community that worships the Cheer Goddess, Vivica. Destiny, the captain, is a cheertator who enlists a bunch of street dancers because their dudes quit and then falls for the street artist one. She's under a lot of stress because another team, the Truth, has challenged her team and apparently this is a big deal. She fights and makes up with her friend Willow and then in a twist that was no surprise at all, the ditzy blonde is actually working for the other side. Turns out she's a cheertator over there while Destiny learns to spread the cheerpower to all the cheerlebrities on her team. This language quirk is constant and at one point lampshaded by street artist guy as a verbal quirk of Destiny even though every cheerleader does it. The Rebels beat the Truth at competition where they are the only two live performers because the other international teams videos were clearly pilfered by the film makers under the guise of them being audition tapes or something. We all learn a valuable lesson about cheership.

This movie is bad in a few different ways. The acting is abysmal, the script is predictable, and overall it felt a lot more like a "Step Up" film than a "Bring It On" film. This may be partially because of the deviation from the race themes of the series and the lack of actual cheering. We definitely got some laughs overall so it's at least worth a watch.

Spoon Rating: 5.5