Bruce Garrett is at the top of his game: the 13-year-old salsa prodigy is about to take the UK Junior Salsa Championships by storm when a gang of youths knock the stuffing out of him along with his desire to dance. Cut to the present day and Bruce (Nick Frost) has swapped Latin grooves for lathe design. Salsa is a distant memory, and he leads a lacklustre and solitary existence, until the witty and beautiful Julia (Rashida Jones) becomes his boss. He is inspired to don his Cuban heels once again to win her heart and defeat his impossible letch of a colleague Drew (Chris O’Dowd) in the process.
Nick Frost has insisted in every press interview that he has always harboured a secret desire to make a dance film. Yet Olivia Colman’s appearance on The Graham Norton Show two weeks ago, when she struggled to recall her own character’s name (it’s Sam, in case you’re still wondering Olivia) let alone much else about the movie, was far more revealing. And who can blame her? Not only is Colman underused as Bruce’s dippy, one-dimensional sister, but the film as a whole is, whilst pleasant enough, hardly memorable. The central joke – a fat, middle-of-the-road man turns out to be really good at salsa! Watch as his belly wobbles in a sequined shirt! - unsurprisingly doesn’t have much mileage. The solid cast and some nice directorial touches – the scene of Garrett eating yoghurt in his kitchen is a deftly evocative and wryly funny moment – prevent disaster and keep things as lively as possible. But more often than not gaps in plot and character are hastily patched up with sequins and feathers.
The one-liners are…. nice, rather than funny, and the dancing is… nice, but not breathtaking. Frost has waxed lyrical about his gruelling training schedule to prepare for the role, yet he just doesn’t convince in the salsa scenes. Bruce’s supposed salsa prowess is talked up for the duration but we never seem to see more than a few shimmies. The film revels in the flamboyance and over-the-topness of the salsa scene whilst gently poking fun at it, and at least the cast seem not to take the thing too seriously. Kavan Novak appears to be putting his all in as Bruce’s camp new salsa friend, yet he doesn’t seem to have been handed a script so much as given free rein to be ‘a bit wacky’ and spurt comedy voices at random. It is precisely this vague scattergun approach that prevents the film from ever really hanging together.
In the end, Cuban Fury is warm-hearted if not warm-blooded; it far more represents the awkward British take on salsa than the corazon that Bruce’s leathery-skinned mentor Ron (Ian McShane) preaches.
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