I Wanna Dance With Somebody Review

Photo Credit - Sony Pictures

For almost 40 years, Whitney Houston has remained a topic of conversation. Sometimes it’s for her once-in-a-lifetime vocals that led to all kinds of charts and sales records. Other times it’s for the tumultuous life she led outside the recording booth and off the stage.

With a plethora of documentaries, news specials, and TV movies focused on her, Houston’s whole story has never entirely been captured, except for Whitney: Can I Be Me?, the excellent Showtime documentary. I Wanna Dance With Somebody is the latest entry into the Houston biopic fray. This one is a little different because it’s produced by longtime Arista Records president Clive Davis and Houston’s sister-in-law, Pat, and has the approval of the Houston family.

With those co-signs, is this the movie that finally gives us the real Whitney Houston? It has some pieces that make it tempting in the acting and music, but it’s best to let I Wanna Dance With Somebody dance solo.

While she resembles Houston's friend and protegee Brandy more closely, Naomi Ackie embodies all of Houston. She captures Houston’s down-to-earth, class-to-sass disposition that endeared her to many aside from her vocal gifts. She’s equally deft at portraying Houston's more complex sides, such as her internal conflicts and the toll addiction and disappointment took.

Although a little underutilized, I Wanna Dance With Somebody’s supporting cast is also strong. Stanley Tucci has a bit of a one-note performance, but he’s the perfect Clive Davis. Clarke Peters plays John Houston in a way that humanizes him yet does nothing to mute the acts that placed him in the tabloids. In a more limited role, Tamara Tunie compliments Ackie’s young Whitney well as the stern Cissy Houston.

The music of I Wanna Dance With Somebody is another hallmark. The selection of songs used in the film will undoubtedly cause some chills and goosebumps. There are even a few musical easter eggs in I Wanna Dance With Somebody for the more astute music fans, such as some surprising reference tracks.

Sadly, that’s where I Wanna Dance With Somebody stops reaching its potential. It starts as an attempt to separate itself from previous works about Houston but ultimately succumbs to the same edited telling of her story.

The chief problem is I Wanna Dance With Somebody’s selective approach to the stories it wants to tell. It covers a lot of ground yet renders essential aspects of Houston’s journey into a series of insignificant moments. On the one hand, it’s understandable because you don’t want to include or spend too much time on certain elements and make them spectacles that overshadow her life. On the other hand, that decision backfires because it misses a lot of vital details that make Houston’s story worthy of sharing.

It gives aspects like her relationships with Robin Crawford and Bobby Brown a good amount of time but does so in an empty way. So little meaningful time is spent exploring the core of her relationships with Crawford and Brown that they feel random instead of genuine, leaving plenty of necessary storytelling on the table. The “Whitney isn’t Black enough” matter is reduced to two conversations that might last a minute and a Soul Train Awards scene, undermining the tragedy and triumph of a still very relevant situation.

Glossing through those life and career-altering stories in favor of focusing on her hits makes I Wanna Dance With Somebody feel less like a film about Houston and more like a typical E! True Hollywood Story episode. They feed the tabloid beast they were trying to counter by not being more honest about those instances and others in her life.

While she did an incredible job getting great performances out of the cast, Kasi Lemmons’s directing also shares some blame for the faults of I Wanna Dance With Somebody. The pacing of the film is dizzying in the wrong way.

The scenes that should have been longer are cut short, and the ones that should have been wrapped up sooner get too much time. The script doesn’t do Lemmons any favors, but pivotal parts of the film are left out in favor of getting to the excruciatingly long final stages of Houston’s life.

Her overreliance on musical recreations and poorly inserted archival footage do far more harm than good. Granted, Lemmons had to do something to account for what the script lacked, but the quality of the recreations and editing make it a problem instead of a solution.

The issue is epitomized by the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards reenactment, which features maybe three rows of attendees and the laziest recreated Bobby Brown performance ever recorded. That and several other scenes that either poorly remade a video or awkwardly inserted archival footage had the stylistic quality of a cable access show.

For fans and people who experienced Houston’s career in real time, I Wanna Dance With Somebody should have been an opportunity to delve deeper into the life of an icon whose legacy has been unfairly defined by tabloid headlines and misfortune. For those unfamiliar with Houston, it should have been the opportunity to learn about who set the standards most of their favorite artist try to attain. Instead, I Wanna Dance With Somebody added more fuel to the nonsense that overshadowed Houston’s accomplishments and the trails she blazed by not making a more committed effort to tell her complete story.