Starring: Jordin Sparks, Whitney Houston, Derek Luke, Mike Epps, Cameron Ejogo, Tika Sumpter, Omari Hardwick, Cee-Lo Green
Director: Salim Akil
Genre: Drama, Music
Rating: C
Have you ever gone on Wikipedia and read the reviews or reception section of a movie and found yourself thinking "wow, this is incredibly biased"? That's how I felt about Sparkle. While a good portion of the reception section of Sparkle's Wikipedia page acknowledges the fact that it's not exactly the best movie, the way that it starts really implies that people think otherwise. People should not think otherwise. While Sparkle is an enjoyable movie and definitely has its great aspects it's not a particularly good movie. The music is there - Sparks, Ejogo, and Sumpter each have great voices and Houston is a legend - but the plot itself is unoriginal, cliched, and predictable. If I could think of another way to say something along those lines, I'd totally say it.
Sparkle tells the tale of Sparkle Anderson (Sparks), her sisters, Sister (Ejogo) and Dee (Sumpter), and their journey into fame, despite the opposition of their mother, Emma (Houston). Sister is acknowledged as the best singer of the group, as well as the most reckless, and basically a whore. Dee is the smart one of the trio; she mostly stays out of trouble and is attempting to get into medical school. Sparkle, however, is somewhere in between - she acts demure and innocent and has horrible self esteem, but has the potential to be a talented songwriter and singer. All of this, however, is disapproved of by their mother, who once attempted to become a singer as well, but failed rather miserably, and is now a uber religious, uper proper, respectable woman.
For a movie that's coming out now, I'm actually kind of embarrassed by how overused so many of the plot points were. There really wasn't anything original about Sparkle, beyond the music itself. You've even seen the characters before, although I do give each of the actors credit in doing their best with the roles that were given to them. I love both Whitney Houston and Cameron Ejogo, who I felt brought the most to their roles. They might have been characters that you've seen many times before, but I still enjoyed the journeys that they took. I pretty much knew what was going to happen before it happened, but I still found myself hoping that they would make the right decisions. I did kind of find something ironic about the fact that Whitney Houston was playing a church going woman with a troubled past, who happened to be the mother of a singer with a drug problem and an abusive husband. Is Satin (Epps) her husband? I'm not certain; they do get engaged and it's implied that they might have gotten married, but we never see it and it's never really established.
That lack of establishment is actually part of the problem of the movie. It washes over the romantic elements of the plot and rushes the more dramatic elements, focusing instead on montages of the girls singing and Sister being beaten. While the music is the film's strong point, I think Akil forgot that there was more to the movie than just that. The relationship between Satin and Sister is developed some what, as is the relationships between the girls and their mother, but everything else is kind of left hanging. It was a bit of a disappointment, really, although the fact that what they did develop was pretty much stereotypical of a music based movie, I guess the lack of development wasn't all that bad. It might have been interesting to see just how many more cliches they could have tossed in there, though.
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