The remake of the 1980 film Fame tells the story of remarkably talented teenagers attending an exclusive performing arts high school in Manhattan specializing in music, acting or dance. For a film about future stars, Fame proves lackluster. It is choppy and overfilled with characters.
Approximately every 30 minutes of the film, a title indicating a new school year for the film’s characters appears. These titles appear at awkward times and disrupt the continuity of the film. The first kiss between romantic interests Jenny (Kay Panabaker), a naive wannabe actress, and Marco (Asher Book), an amazingly talented singer and actor in Jenny’s class, is annoyingly interrupted by a title saying “Junior Year.”
The audience of the film may expect the romance between Jenny and Marco, but skipping ahead just as they share a moment leaves a feeling that part of the story is missing.
Fame shifts focus between the stories of many different students, also adding to the choppiness of the story. The audience learns about the struggles of classical pianist Denise (Naturi Naughton) and then suddenly sees Jenny and Marco fighting. As acting students interact minimally with music or dance students, these sudden changes can be disconcerting to an audience and make it hard to get attached to any character.
Another problem with the film is that between too many characters and the musical numbers, it suffers from a lack of plot. Fame follows the high school experience of so many students that it never goes into depth about any of them. This takes away from any story the movie possesses.
The musical numbers eclipse the dialogue and other plot driving elements of the film. This is especially apparent at the beginning of the film. The sequence showing the students auditioning for admission to the high school contains minimal amounts of dialogue.
Similarly, the portion of the film that chronicles freshman year is too filled with Denise’s piano playing and Jenny and Marco’s singing to leave much opportunity for plot development. The dialogue just becomes a transition between musical moments.
The film’s lack of plot does not leave the actors with much opportunity to shine. Naughton gets the opportunity to show off her vocals with numbers like “Fame,” and Kherington Payne shows off fierce dance moves as star dance student Alice. However, the predictability of the story and sheer cheesiness of much of the dialogue, especially the dialogue given to Book and Panabaker, fosters one-dimensional acting.
Even Kelsey Grammar, a veteran actor, was relegated to playing an unsupportive teacher without much screen time or impressive dialogue to deliver.
One of the movie’s highlights was the vocal coach’s (Mullallay) karaoke performance of “You Took Advantage of Me” from the musical On Your Toes. Mullallay belts out the high note of the song with flair. While this scene seems out of the blue in the context of Fame‘s plot, it is one of the movie’s few truly entertaining moments.
Mullallay’s performance of the song also stands out in the film’s lackluster soundtrack.
Fame certainly provides entertainment despite its lack of depth and continuity. Be warned, however; the film’s iconic title song does not appear until the end credits.