Lord of the Dance 3D: More Dimensions for Michael Flatley's Megalomania

Comments (0) By Michelle Orange Wednesday, Mar 16 2011

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b>Lord of the Dance 3D
Directed by Marcus Viner
SuperVision Media
Opens March 17

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Michael Flatley knows what you think of him. He’s heard it all—cantering megalomaniac, spotlight-humping hambone—and he’s here to tell you that he’s selling out stages around the world without you. Yet I suspect even his fans—and I could now identify at least a couple of you in a lineup—will be disappointed by Lord of the Dance 3D. After an introduction in which Flatley enumerates his successes, taunts the haters, and talks up his homecoming Dublin show, the film comprises a single concert as performed, which means it never morphs into the amazing Christopher Guest jam it first suggests. Strike two is the fact that, not counting one superb, David Lee Roth scissor-kick in slo-mo, director Marcus Viner does little to marry Flatley’s métier to the form. Irish step dancing—in which dancers stand in place and twizzle, stab, and stomp their feet into the floor in perfect, martial formation—is particularly ill-suited to 3-D, and in most of the dozen or so set pieces, Flatley, wearing black, dances against a black background (and Fred Astaire wept). Even Flatley infidels will find themselves starved for a well-lit close-up of those whirling feet, or maybe just the tantalizing illusion of a swift, blackout kick to the head.