Street Dancer 3D review: A silly façade of street dance battles

Rating: 2 stars

It’s sad that a dance film directed by a choreographer (Remo D’Souza) lacks soul and emotion at its core i.e. dancing. Street Dancer 3D pits Varun Dhawan and Shraddha Kapoor who starred together in another dance film ABCD2, against each other to win the Ground Zero competition. Set in London this film tries to capture much more than dancing. For instance there are illegal immigrants from Indian subcontinent wanting to go back to their motherland. D’Souza who takes the credit for the story of this film sets a dance competition with undercurrent of problems faced by illegal immigrants.

Revealing more about this issue will take away the emotional endurance of the film which is really low to begin with. The narrative shows problematic areas from the beginning itself. However, it has a well choreographed and performed intro song Illegal Weapon 2.0 where the two rival dance groups; one headed by Dhawan and other by Kapoor engage in a street dance battle. You get the initial conflict. Dhawan’s group is of Indians and Kapoor’s is of Pakistanis. You know what is more likely to be in store for us.

There are quarrels over India versus Pakistan cricket match (which is a ridiculous blunder in this one). The first match of the tournament shows the footage of India versus Pakistan game from Champions Trophy 2017 while the final match footage is that of the clash between the neighbours during ICC Cricket World Cup 2019. With such quarrels there will be moral lectures. Prabhudheva has been hired to do this job in this film. He gives his pep talk on dance, physics, morality and much more.

It is evident that the dancers, the lead actors and makers have taken a lot of effort in creating the dance set-pieces but the material leading up to those is so lousy that you lose interest in seeing the battle. The dancing looks more like acrobatic stunts. The sequence that is thoroughly enjoyable is when Prabhudheva breaks into the recreation of his 90s super-hit classic Muqabala. The final competition sequence where they dance to Mile Surr Mera Tumhara is nicely done but it is plagued by the obvious turn of events.

Aparshakti Khurana plays a cameo as an illegal immigrant. Nora Fatehi does what she does best, doing all the twerks and splits and jumps and grooves to songs like Garmi. Over enthusiasm reduces Varun Dhawan to being only himself. Shraddha Kapoor looks stunning and dances well but again there’s not much to do in this film. Had the makers avoided clichés and made it little less obvious and preachy, Street Dancer 3D could have entertained more. It is probably meant for single screens and dance lovers. Hopefully, they’ll have fun watching it.