The producers of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights have a shrewd strategy in remaking the original 1987 hit for a modern audience. The plot is essentially the same (good girl away from home meets bad boy, he teaches her to dance, and they fall in love despite parental objection) and follows a similar arc, ensuring that all the emotional buttons pushed by the prototype are touched upon again. Setting the new film in Cuba at the height of the Castro revolution helps camouflage the redundancy, and gives Havana Nights an ethnic flavor that makes room for an urban-oriented soundtrack from high-profile artists like Wyclef Jean, Mya, and Christina Aguilera. Indeed, the music in the film sounds entirely modern, produced with fat beats and even the occasional rap interlude, often negating the film's 1958 time frame. It doesn't matter, however, because for a lightweight musical, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights does just fine, with an attractive, appealing cast and lots of movement. The film rounds all the bases in record time, bringing leads Romola Garai and Diego Luna together within the first five minutes and painting each supporting character with a wide brush for instant identification. While director Guy Ferland dares to preface the story with "Based on true events," there isn't much history to be found, and often the impending revolution is forgotten among montage sequences of the two young lovers dancing on beaches and in nightclubs. The politics of the era are used mainly to establish a sense of conflict and tragedy for Luna's Xavier, who lost a father to the unjust government and is chastised by his firebrand brother for consorting with the Americans. So don't expect Havana Nights to get into any ideology, because all it wants to do is dance, which it does, constantly. Patrick Swayze pops up briefly to show Garai some steps and give her a pep talk on "facing her fears," Sela Ward is the mother who left her dream of professional dance behind to bear children, and the Cuban population is so hot-blooded that they do their dirty dancing everywhere, slithering against each other without shame through the streets with hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas providing the beat. The very predictability of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is its strongest asset, providing a low-impact love story for teenyboppers and romance novel readers. Anyone with an interest in Cuban history or expecting lots of authentic Latin music should probably steer clear.
