Cuban Fury
A dance comedy embarrassingly out of key.
Overview
After spending most of his career dancing the tango with Simon Pegg, the loveable Nick Frost gets the chance to take the lead. It's a shame that the tune he's moving to is so embarrassingly out of key. A bland, salsa-themed rom-com without a single surprising bone in its silk-and-sequin-clad body, Cuban Fury is a comedy of the most risk averse and unimaginative kind.
The premise goes like this: Bruce Garrett (Frost) is a former child salsa dancer, now lonely, overweight engineer, who spends his days being belittled by his womanising colleague Drew (Chris O'Dowd). But Bruce's passions are reignited by the arrival of his new boss, a beautiful American woman named Julia (Rashida Jones). She's way out of his league, physically speaking, but it turns out Julia loves salsa, which puts Brucey in with a chance. All he has to do is get his groove back.
Frost is an endearing screen presence and ensures Bruce is easy to root for. He's also not a bad dancer, as it turns out. Sadly, natural comic charm and fancy footwork can only do so much when the script is as woeful as this. Working from an 'original idea' by Frost, Jon Brown has produced a screenplay that is predictable, cliched and strangely scarce in actual jokes; what few there come usually at the expense of either Bruce's weight, or the campy mannerisms of Bejan (Kayvan Novak), a flamboyantly gay man in Bruce's dance class.
Such a cringingly one-dimensional representation is typical of all the supporting characters, which is an even bigger shame considering the genuinely high calibre of the cast. O'Dowd lands a handful of funny lines, but ultimately can't do much with such a stock-standard slime ball. The great Ian McShane, meanwhile, is left to slum it in his role as Bruce's grizzled former dance instructor Ron.
Still, the most thankless part belong to Jones, whose talents as comic performer go unforgivably unexploited. Introduced via full body panning shot, it's immediately clear that Julia will be nothing more than the love interest; a pretty face for Bruce and Drew to dance-battle over. There's an unpleasant, all-too-common double standard at play in Cuban Fury's body and gender politics. Bruce finds his mojo and gets the girl in spite of his weight, yet Julia is only seen as an object of desire because she's physically attractive.
That being said, it's hard to be seriously offended by a movie as generic and forgettable as this one. The highest praise Cuban Fury deserves is that will rightfully fade from the public consciousness as soon as it disappears from theatres, doing little likely long-term harm to the careers of anyone involved.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tpiyFHf7GKU
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