A musical bio-pic covering the life of musical superstar Whitney Houston (Naomi Ackie).
When I heard this movie was not good, I thought it might be a good exercise in unpicking the reasons it does not work. Or maybe I would love it.
Sadly, I Wanna Dance with Somebody is just very unexceptional. It is bad, but not in a singular way.
I cannot analyse Naomi Ackie's performance, and it is no fault of the actress - the film is in such a hurry to tick off the next significant/famous moment that there is no room for character or drama. For Ackie, there are no standout scenes or sequences where we get to see this character develop.
The only standout thing about the movie is how much ground it is trying to cover. It might be one of the busiest biopics I have ever seen, in terms of cutting quickly between snippets of scenes.
We get important moments - the first time Whitney meets Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams); her audition for Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci); her first encounter with Bobby Brown... - but they are all crammed in with no sense of rhythm or structure.
To crib from the title of one of Houston's movies, this movie is never concerned with exhaling.
And while it covers important milestones in Houston's life, there is an overriding sense that events have been smoothed out.
Houston's drug abuse is tangential up until the third act, but the way it is reintroduced is so abrupt that it feels like scenes are missing. And because the movie is sliced like confetti, there is no sense of Houston's fall.
This movie does not want to focus on the back half of Houston's life - the drugs, the poor performances, the reality show with Bobby Brown - and there is an argument to be made to cast her whole life as a tragedy.
But the film never commits to any position on Houston's life. A version which focused on Houston's rise and fall would be cliche - but it would be a story. This movie is content to be a vague highlight reel, with characters who exist solely to restate events like quotes from a history book.
There are a few nuggets of gold - Nafessa Williams is good as Robyn, the clear eye in the centre of the storm, and Tamara Tunie is under-utilised as the controlling matriarch Cissy.
But this is overlong and formless.
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