Released in 1983, Staying Alive can be credited, along with such other stinkers as Urban Cowboy, with putting John Travolta's career in a deep coma. Punters may wonder if this effort is as abominable as Travolta's more recent failures such as Battlefield Earth. The answer to that question is simple. It is all that bad, and more. Some would say that not working at all is preferable to working in such a supreme stinker that it taints your resumé for life. Films like Staying Alive prove them to be right.
Conceived as a sequel to the surprise disco-exploitation hit of the 1970s, namely Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive picks up a few years later. The hero of the piece, Tony Manero, is struggling to turn his one big talent into a way of making money. As a dancer on the Broadway stage, no less. The film features so many scenes of dance rehearsals that one could almost call it an extended commercial for a ballet school, or something along those lines. The problem that Staying Alive suffers is, ironically, fairly similar to that suffered by Showgirls. Namely, once you strip away what one would consider the money shots, there just isn't a whole lot left. The story on offer here is so minimal as to be nonexistent.
It doesn't help matters that much of the contemporary music offered in this film is bland, generic 1980s synth-guitar pop that dates the film so badly they couldn't even get the same effect by stamping "this is a product of the early 1980s" upon every frame. I appreciate that it is difficult to make a truly timeless musical, but scenes from StarShip Troopers or RoboCop do show that this is in fact very possible. Zoë Poledouris' composition in the latter has it all over the offal served up here, which in turn firmly stamps the 1980s as the decade taste forgot.
Sylvester Stallone proves here that he is much better in front of a camera than behind it. The whole thing looks and feels like an extended Days Of Our Lives episode, from the flat cinematography to the bland scene composition. Many of the shots make it impossible to make out the dancers' motions, and there are enough jump cuts to make a viewer with memory problems feel quite disoriented. The acting is not much better. John Travolta does the best he can with a bland script, but when the characters show no difference in the final frame compared to frame one, something has definitely gone amiss. I am racking my brain trying to remember seeing any of the other actors elsewhere, and coming up with a big blank. Which is just as well - a slab of beef could emote more convincingly.
The big ending dance number shows an incredible lack of respect for the rules of cinema, where every shot is meant to have a purpose to the overall story. These sequences quite apparently have little other purpose than to extend the length of the film, and they do not really do a very good job at that. One could cut thirty to forty minutes out of the total running length, and the film would make the same amount of sense.
I gave Staying Alive a two out of ten. I won't even dignify it with a one, because it is literally too bad to be vaguely good. Instead, it is merely so bad, so self-indulgent, and so amateurish, that it could quite easily be labelled a career-killer. Avoid.
Conceived as a sequel to the surprise disco-exploitation hit of the 1970s, namely Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive picks up a few years later. The hero of the piece, Tony Manero, is struggling to turn his one big talent into a way of making money. As a dancer on the Broadway stage, no less. The film features so many scenes of dance rehearsals that one could almost call it an extended commercial for a ballet school, or something along those lines. The problem that Staying Alive suffers is, ironically, fairly similar to that suffered by Showgirls. Namely, once you strip away what one would consider the money shots, there just isn't a whole lot left. The story on offer here is so minimal as to be nonexistent.
It doesn't help matters that much of the contemporary music offered in this film is bland, generic 1980s synth-guitar pop that dates the film so badly they couldn't even get the same effect by stamping "this is a product of the early 1980s" upon every frame. I appreciate that it is difficult to make a truly timeless musical, but scenes from StarShip Troopers or RoboCop do show that this is in fact very possible. Zoë Poledouris' composition in the latter has it all over the offal served up here, which in turn firmly stamps the 1980s as the decade taste forgot.
Sylvester Stallone proves here that he is much better in front of a camera than behind it. The whole thing looks and feels like an extended Days Of Our Lives episode, from the flat cinematography to the bland scene composition. Many of the shots make it impossible to make out the dancers' motions, and there are enough jump cuts to make a viewer with memory problems feel quite disoriented. The acting is not much better. John Travolta does the best he can with a bland script, but when the characters show no difference in the final frame compared to frame one, something has definitely gone amiss. I am racking my brain trying to remember seeing any of the other actors elsewhere, and coming up with a big blank. Which is just as well - a slab of beef could emote more convincingly.
The big ending dance number shows an incredible lack of respect for the rules of cinema, where every shot is meant to have a purpose to the overall story. These sequences quite apparently have little other purpose than to extend the length of the film, and they do not really do a very good job at that. One could cut thirty to forty minutes out of the total running length, and the film would make the same amount of sense.
I gave Staying Alive a two out of ten. I won't even dignify it with a one, because it is literally too bad to be vaguely good. Instead, it is merely so bad, so self-indulgent, and so amateurish, that it could quite easily be labelled a career-killer. Avoid.