Honey

An inner-city dance instructor (Jessica Alba) lands a job dancing in hip-hop videos and wants to share her success with the kids in her neighborhood. Sincerity and a lively soundtrack are the main virtues of this standard-issue live-your-dream urban dance drama. The clichés of Alonzo Brown and Kim Watson’s script are abundant but harmless enough. Less innocuous, though, is the unwieldy direction of Billie Woodruff, a music-video veteran making his feature debut. He hasn’t the experience to shape a scene dramatically, and the effort seems to throw him off his game with the music: sharp, energetic dancing is undermined by listless, twitchy editing. Another liability is the weak acting from a shallow talent pool; only Alba and Mekhi Phifer (as a sympathetic neighbor) perform with real conviction.