Breakin'

1984

Action / Comedy / Drama / Music / Romance

22
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 73% · 9 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 73% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 5.9/10 10 7822 7.8K

dancing rap music hip-hop street gang breakdance ghetto

Plot summary

A struggling young dancer joins forces with two breakdancers and together they become a street sensation.

Director

Joel Silberg Photo
Joel Silberg

Top cast

Jean-Claude Van Damme Photo
Jean-Claude Van Damme as Spectator in First Dance Sequence
Lela Rochon Photo
Lela Rochon as Extra in First Scene
Kara Vallow Photo
Kara Vallow as Break Dancer
Ice-T Photo
Ice-T as Rap Talker
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
795.45 MB
1280*694
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 26 min
Seeds 4
1.54 GB
1920*1040
English 5.1
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 26 min
Seeds 11

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by blainsta 7 / 10

Breakin 1984

Breakin ...what can we say...if you were on the scene at the time in 1984 it was massive although Beat Street the movie came out shortly after and was more gritty and realistic with better dancing but Breakin had an ok story and the radio tron scenes plus a few others were great plus Lucinda Dickey was WOW!! - unfortunately it started to evolve towards the end of the movie, heading towards the ridiculously awful Breakin 2 - electric Boogaloo which is a crying shame as it needed to go more radiotron scene and that's the reason Beat Street remains the stand out breakdancing movie as it stayed loyal to its roots...there was no Hollywood glam up!... Overall a good to average movie, growing up I watched the radiotron scenes a thousand times - but avoid Breakin 2 as it's just nauseating!!
Reviewed by evanston_dad 6 / 10

There's Not a Lot of Point to Reviewing a Movie Like This

I grew up in a town of 500 people. That is important to keep in mind while I tell this story. A town of 500 people in rural Illinois. No black people. When I was in junior high, my next door neighbors went through a serious breakdancing phase, and they recruited me to be on their gang? Team? Troupe? (what do you call a group of breakdancers? Let's go with "gang" because that sounds coolest) even though I couldn't break dance. I could do exactly one move -- that worm thing where you lay on your stomach and kind of flop your body forwards from feet to head like a centipede having a full body convulsion. Except I couldn't go forwards, only backwards. We called ourselves the Pop Lockers, without a hint of irony. We made matching t-shirts by painting on white undershirts, and even tried to recreate the look of urban graffiti as only a bunch of white rural kids who've never even seen a black person can.Even in a town of only 500 people, we managed to find a rival break dance gang (maybe the Sharks? Though I might just be confusing my memories of childhood with "West Side Story"). We were always threatening to have a break dance rumble, but it never materialized.I didn't see "Breakin'" when I was a kid. I only just now saw it for the first time on TCM. But in retrospect I'm guessing my neighbors did, and another piece of that whole puzzle has now fallen into place.This is not the kind of movie you review. This is the kind of movie you watch if you want to enjoy a corny, pretty bad movie, or you don't watch if you don't. My rating of it is based on how entertained I was during it, not how good a movie I thought it was.This is also the kind of movie you watch if you want to get a brief glimpse of Jean Claude Van Damme (yes, that Jean Claude Van Damme) dancing in the background of one scene while wearing a black unitard. And let's be honest, who doesn't want to see that?Grade: B.
Reviewed by BandSAboutMovies 7 / 10

A great time to be alive

Whether you know this movie as Breakin', Breakdance the Movie or Break Street '84, this film was inspired by a documentary named Breakin' 'n' Enterin', which told the true story of the talent at the Los Angeles hip hop club Radio-Tron, which included Ice-T and Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, both of whom appear here.Menahem Golan's daughter saw breakdancers perform in Venice Beach and was so excited that her enthusiasm inspired him to rush this movie into theaters, hoping to beat Beat Street. This would not be the last time that Golan was in a mad rush to get a dance-themed movie on screens before anyone else.Kelly "Special K" Bennett (Lucinda Dickey, a Cannon all-star who is also in this film's sequel and the magical Ninja 3: The Domination) is training to be a dancer under the direction of Franco (Ben Lokey). To help keep her inspired, her friend Adam (Phineas Newborn III) introduces her to Orlando "Ozone" Barco (Adolfo "Shabba Doo" Quiñones) and Tony "Turbo" Ainley (Chambers), two breakdancers who are self-trained and have their own unique style unlike anything she's seen in dance school.Kelly is met with disdain by everyone when she attempts to bring their energy into the world of dance. And then Franco gets way too intimate with her, so she quits training and becomes a breakdancer, upsetting the rich side of her life but fulfilling her spirit as she and the newly formed T. K. O. Crew defeat other dance teams like Electro Rock and her manager James Wilcox (Christopher McDonald, who I will always just call Shooter McGavin) starts seeing dollar signs.Can Kelly unite art and the street? Of course, the story is very basic. But it's the sheer joy of seeing this dance on screen, the amazing soundtrack - which has everyone from Rufus and Chaka Khan, Kraftwerk, Art of Noise, Hot Streak and Ollie & Jerry - and the time capsule 80s nature of this movie that make it a winner. Somehow, Cannon would top it with the sequel, somehow, someway.Critics were all over this movie's lack of a story, but who cares? We're here for the music and the dancing choereographed by West Side Story dancer Jamie Rogers. It's also one of the rare times when Cannon was making the trend instead of trying to be part of one.Israeli director Joel Silberg went from this movie to a spiritual third film in the series, Rappin', as well as Lambada, which was choreographed by Shabba-Doo. That movie - and its competition The Forbidden Dance - is a story we'll get to soon.Breakin' is the final Cannon film production released by MGM/UA - to find out why, check out Bolero - which made Cannon become its own distribution company again. I wonder if MGM/UA had second thoughts, because Cannon turned this $1.2 million dollar movie into $38.7 million dollars at the box office. Breakin' opened at number one and even outgrossed Sixteen Candles, which played on two hundred more screens in their first week.Also, you probaby already know that this is Jean Claude Van Damme's first movie appearance. He's on the beach dancing next to Michel Qissi, who would be his rival Tong Po in Kickboxer. We should all aspire to the same joy that Van Damme has in this scene.
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