I Wanna Dance With Somebody Review
A serviceably delivered performance as Whitney is not nearly enough to save this otherwise plodding, paint by numbers biopic.
Telling the story of Whitney Houston (Naomi Ackie) from her early start performing with her mother Cissy (Tamara Tunie), to her signing with Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci) and beyond. The film chronicles her relationship with Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders), her relationship with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), and the financial trouble brought upon her by her father John (Clarke Peters). Ultimately, the movie deals with her famed demise at the hands of an overdose.
The first thing that should be said about I Wanna Dance With Somebody is that both Naomi Ackie and Stanley Tucci deliver excellent performances. Ackie is fantastic as Whitney, although admittedly the lip-sync heavy performance doesn’t touch the biopic work of others in recent times (Andrea Risebourgh, Rami Malek and Taron Edgerton all would pip her quite easily). Tucci, meanwhile, is fantastically entertaining and elevates the dialogue written for him effortlessly.
That dialogue, and the story around it, presents most of the problem. In what is a largely sanitized biopic, the dialogue presented comes across often as cliche in the extreme. Some of the lines are truly woeful.
The film is also presented in an oddly signposted way. Each scene wraps up with a line of dialogue that translates directly into the next scene. Whitney gets a call at the end of one scene about the Superbowl? Next scene she’s performing at the Superbowl. She’s in the car with a friend, who casually and hamfistedly mentions that she might get married soon? Next scene she’s proposed to. It’s movie-making (and watching) for toddlers, and feels completely disingenuous.
It also lends the film an odd quality with respect to time. The film feels both too long and too short simultaneously. It crams too much in, while also making you feel like there has been nothing on display. By couching each event in these pairs, their time in the movie feels very concrete and short - they don’t carry as well as they should, and the movie almost becomes a series of scenes, rather than a cohesive whole.
By the time the movie wraps up, you’ll find yourself with little more knowledge of Whitney than you had going in, and with an odd sense that this movie never really scraped the surface of her life - despite its’ extended runtime.
