Work It (2020)

Work It arrives as a 2020 Netflix dance comedy, which is to say it arrives as a piece of furniture. Sabrina Carpenter plays Quinn Ackerman, a clumsy high school senior who lies her way into the good graces of a Duke admissions officer and then assembles a dance crew to make the lie true. The crew is assembled with evident care. A South Asian best friend, a Black rival, a Black love interest, a Black administrator, a rotating cast of misfits who each dance differently. The film's own summary describes them as students of different backgrounds. That phrase does a great deal of labor here, and the film asks it to do more than it can bear. Race is present on screen constantly and mentioned almost never, an arrangement suggesting a rainbow assembled with great care and no stated purpose.

Director Laura Terruso and a producing team that includes Alicia Keys and, in an executive capacity, Carpenter herself, build the story around a girl who discovers that Duke and medical school were her parents' dream and not hers. It is a clean enough arc, and the central friendship between Quinn and Jasmine carries real weight. The film is not interested in making a case. It is interested in a dance number, and then another one.

The moral arrives through plot instead of monologue, which we can respect. Follow your passion, defy the transcript, take the car keys. It is inspirational in the way a greeting card is inspirational, and roughly as confrontational. The result is pleasant, well-cast, and entirely untroubled by its own implications. A film that wants credit for its ensemble without ever asking what the ensemble is for.