Fame Review

The original Fame the world knows and mostly loves is exuberant, gritty and playful, following the lives of a bunch of performing arts students with more in the way of unfocused desire than polished ability. The New York it's set in is a ramshackle city running on fractured nervous energy, before Giuliani clean-ups and Candace Bushnell cocktails were a glimmer in anyone's eye.

With the raw energy of the 1980 version sanded clean away, this is the Sunny Delight to the original's fresh orange juice, the processed cheese to its mozzarella. Though it makes occasional brief nods to the original, the plot, characters and even the songs are so mysteriously drained of complexity and fun that it's hard to fathom why the filmmakers bothered to conceive of this as a remake of Fame at all. They would have done better to start afresh in a fictional dance school, allowing them to go ahead and make the kind of plastic, scrubbed-clean drama they wanted without tarnishing the good name of the original.

Barely standing out in a cast populated by paper-thin stereotypes, the saccharine lead couple, Jenny (Kay Panabaker) and Marco (Asher Book), are clean-cut, wholesome kids, apparently empty of the kind of unsettling desires and anxiety that might make someone want to become famous. In a depressingly revealing scene, Jenny is told that her rendition of a song lacks emotion, and is advised to observe Marco for some pointers. He gets up, brow furrowed with some kind of primitive hieroglyph for feeling, and sings the same song through a cloying grin, with pauses. The editor did well to cut this scene short - the students' actual singing/dancing/acting/whatever struggles to live up to the hype it's given, especially as everyone seems to arrive at the school already fully formed. Many of the cast are so adorably fresh-faced that it's a relief to find out that unlikely femme fatale Jenny is all of 17. That gives a clue as to this new Fame's target audience - it's aimed at pre-teens for whom a kiss is a thrill and the hint of drink enough to damn a character as a ne'er-do-well.