You Got Served (How Bad Can They Be? Part IV)



For the latest in my continuing series of looks at recent movies that have dubbed “the worst movie ever” by overzealous internet critics, publicity seeking print critics, or the fickle whims of the people who vote for movie ratings on the imdb. Here’s Part I, Part II, and Part III.

For Part IV I watched You Got Served (2004), the new movie about competitive break dancing. I thought break dancing went out with Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugaloo (1984), but apparently I was wrong. It survives to this day in southern California, where, if You Got Served is to be believed, amateur crews of dancers compete in packed clubs for the adulation of the crowd. As near as I can tell the winner is the crew whose with the most homoerotic routine. One crew “gets served” which… let me check my notes… is bad. According to my notes doing something good is “tight.”


"Now let's form Voltron!"

Our main characters are David (Omari Grandberry) and Elgin (Marques Houston), who lead the tightest crew of them all. Outside of developing the skills that will allow them to be back-up dancers for Britney Spears, these two young men lead lives full of hip-hop movie clichés. One of them is interested in the other’s sister; the sister was accepted to an Ivy League school but can’t afford to go; both of them are reluctant runners for a drug dealer, etc. One day David and Elgin are challenged to a high stakes dance off by Wade, a white boy from the O.C. When David and Elgin show up they find that Wade’s mostly white crew includes a defector from their own mostly black crew. With their moves compromised, David and Elgin are served. This plot development may be intended as a pointed commentary on how white suburban teens appropriate and commercialize trends that originate in black street culture, or it may just be a blatant rip-off of Bring it On (2000).

David and Elgin have a falling out, and don’t get together again until the big dance contest at the end of the film, sponsored by MTV with a prize of $50,000 that will be used to make everything right again. And naturally David and Elgin's crew have a final dance-off with Wade's crew, "just like they do it on the street!" This last line is delivered by celebrity judge Lil' Kim, practicing for the inevitable day when she replaces Paula Abdul on American Idol.


Of course, most of what Lil' Kim knows about the street is from being mistaken for a woman who walks on it.

You Got Served is a very bad movie. I expected that. After all, there was a time when this movie was ranked as the worst of all time by people voting on the imdb. It really crosses the line when a child sidekick to the crew, Lil' Saint (Lost's Malcolm David Kelley), is killed off screen in a crass attempt to pull at the audience's heart strings. Most of the acting is just bad, I'm guessing because it was cheaper to get real dancers and have them pretend to act than to pay real actors to learn to dance. The alleged slang can get tiresome as well. No one actually says, "D.J., drop it like a bag of armpit hair," but I wouldn't have been surprised.

In the grand scheme of things is it the worst movie ever made? Heck, it isn't even the worst dance craze movie I've seen. You Got Served is forgettable. The Forbidden Dance (1990), one of two lambada movies made that year, has a scene where the main female character does the lambada with Richard Lynch to save the rain forest. That will scar your eyeballs permanently.

Posted: Fri - December 31, 2004 at      

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