Rent Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022)

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (aka I Wanna Dance with Somebody) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

It would be nice to say that I Wanna Dance With Somebody was a good Whitney Houston movie. After so many movies about her life were rushed out in a hurry to capitalize on her legacy, few of them made for a compelling biopic beyond the bog-standard, Wikipedia-scanning recounts. This film is no different.

For 2.5 hours, this dramatization of one of the world’s best singers darts between two types of scenes. There are concert scenes where Naomi Ackie performs solidly as Houston, doing her best to embody her performances and presence on stage. Then there are the behind-the-scenes drama moments that start up and fall off before they ever grace anything more than cliff-notes of her life. So much of Houston’s rise and fall is presented in bullet point form, where her many friendships and business relations occur almost inexplicably.

There’s no time to appreciate Houston's bonding with her best friend Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), and how she felt helpless to pull Whitney out of harm’s way. There’s no time to explore the romantic bond Whitney formed with the troublesome Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders) and how it ruined her life. There’s no time to see the cunning professionalism between Houston and her producer Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci), reducing his role in this to noticing how a star is born. There’s no time for this when the film has to rush to the next concert sequence, as though the film is too antsy and can’t sit still without a song every five minutes.

It’s a real shame that this film zips so quickly from each highlight of Houston’s life like a sugar-crazed fan flipping through her biography to get to the good parts. There are aspects worth exploring, such as how the African-American community saw Houston’s music as less black for her voice appealing to white people. This issue is addressed but then quickly swept under the rug by Houston’s fierce determination or Brown’s “ignore the haters” pep talk. So much of her life is reduced to such simple scenes.

Take, for example, the scene where she tries to find a movie role. She passes on The Bodyguard until she hears that Kevin Costner is involved, making her rethink the somewhat meta nature of her role. The scene before filming where she’s coerced into singing a Dolly Parton song also feels like such a minor footnote that it’s barely worth mentioning, despite being the origin for Houston’s most iconic film role and song.

The film’s rush to cover all of Houston’s life ultimately says very little that hasn’t been spewed in TV movies or noted in the hundreds of memorial columns following her death. Over the film’s soggy 2.5 hours, there’s rarely a moment off-stage where Houston’s story comes to life or touches something more profound. It’s just a standard biopic for a woman who was anything but standard. The only reason to watch this film is to skip ahead to the concert segments, which are decently assembled, but not enough to overlook the lackluster dicing up of this tale.