Honey
Review by Demetrius Payne for Reel Movie Critic
H 1/2
Cast
Jessica Alba	Honey Daniels
Mekhi Phifer	Chaz
Directed by Billie Woodruff. A romance/drama. Rated PG-13 (for drug content and some sexual references). Running time: 89 minutes.

Honey Daniels (Alba) is a smart, sexy, tough young woman who loves to dance. She also loves to teach dancing and help out kids, and whenever the opportunity presents itself to do any of the above, she goes for it. She teaches dancing at a local community center in her hometown of Brooklyn, and to make ends meet she also bartends at a nightclub in the Big Apple. In pursuit of her dreams we see Honey audition time and again for music videos or anything that will allow her to dance for a living full-time. One night while dancing in the club after work she is videotaped by a big-time video director's assistant, who procures Honey's services to dance and eventually choreograph his music videos. As time goes on it becomes evident that this director's intentions are anything but artistic and Honey's defiance of his advances makes her road that much more difficult to make her dreams reality.

I went into this movie thinking it was going to be bad. I thought that when it started at 4:45pm and was convinced of it by 5:19. I know these times for a fact because I was constantly looking at my watch to predict what was going to happen next. A good litmus test for how bad a movie is is to say to yourself, or to whomever's around you, that you believe "these two are going to fall in love in 30 minutes," or "this kid's going to get locked up for selling drugs in 45 minutes." Naturally, the more accurate your predictions, the more predictable a movie, the more horrible a movie you're watching. This movie is bad, not in the sense that it's ill conceived but in the sense that it was poorly executed. So bad in fact that it made for one of those chicken or the egg scenarios. Does the acting look bad because the writing's bad, or does the writing seem bad because the acting is so bad? My answer to the question is "take your pick."

Another tell-tale sign of a movie with a problem is the number of rappers and singers you have in a movie, the more the people making the movie are just trying to lure folks into the theaters by putting popular entertainers in the credits, knowing full well that the movie is weaker than Kool-Aid without the sugar. One rapper/singer is not a death sentence, but more than three should set off every color flag in the spectrum. There are much better ways to spend your time than this movie, please pick one.