Appropriately enough for an MTV production, 'Save The Last Dance' is best summed up by the music. It's a score of two parts: the many and varied hot booty dance numbers, and Mark Isham's cloying and intrusive score that tends to turn up in the more sickeningly preening teen moments.
This two-step is repeated elsewhere: while the performances are hip, and the mainly black high school is refreshingly clear of the guns 'n' gangs cliches, the plot is a hybrid of every crappy teen-dance-romance ever made.
Why, here's the audition from 'Flashdance', the forbidden romance of 'Dirty Dancing', the bitchy rivalry of 'Fame' etc. etc. Not only that, having a white girl (the charming Stiles) act as our guide to this foreign world of black music and exotic dancing is just a touch patronising, no?