Released theatrically in the United States on January 12, 2001, the film received mixed reviews from critics but was a box-office success and grossed $131.7 million worldwide against a $13 million budget.
Seventeen-year-old Sara Johnson, a promising ballet dancer in suburban Chicago, hopes to be admitted to Juilliard School and implores her mother to attend the audition. She fails the audition and soon learns that her mother was killed in a car accident in her haste to get to it.
Sara is wracked with guilt and gives up ballet. She moves to the South Side to live with her estranged father Roy, a relatively unsuccessful jazz musician who plays the trumpet at nightclubs. Sara moves in with Ray, who lives in a dilapidated home. Sara transfers to a majority-black high school, where she is one of a handful of white students. Sara quickly befriends Chenille Reynolds, a teenage single mother who is having relationship problems with her ex-boyfriend Kenny.
Chenille invites Sara to a dance club called Stepps, where Sara has her first experience dancing to hip hop rhythms. At Stepps, Sara dances with Derek, Chenille's brother . Derek is rare in the community, but is a bright student with dreams of attending Georgetown University to become a pediatrician. Derek likes Sara, and decides to help her develop her dancing an abilities by incorporating more hip hop into her style.
Derek takes a reluctant Sara to the Joffrey Ballet and, afterwards, she confides in him about her mother and her dreams. Later, they return to the club and amaze others with their dancing. While performing, Derek's ex-girlfriend Nikki interrupts them and begins dancing with Derek, making Sara retreat to the bar.
Afterward, Derek returns to Sara and apologizes for pairing up with Nikki; they subsequently make up and return to Roy's apartment. Having achieved his dream of being accepted into Georgetown, Derek convinces Sara to follow her dreams of Juilliard; they eventually begin a romantic relationship.
At school, Nikki picks a fight with Sara during gym. While Chenille is stressed at an urgent doctor visit for her child, Chenille tells Sara that she did not approve of the fight. Chenille states she can sympathize with Nikki’s bitterness since Sara, a white girl, is seamingly "stealing" one of the few decent black boys at school. Because of this conversation, Sara and Chenille's friendship becomes strained, and Sara decides to break up with Derek.
Meanwhile, Derek deals with his friend Malakai, who is heavily involved in the gang lifestyle that Derek is trying to leave. Derek agrees to help Malakai execute a drive-by at the same time as Sara's audition. Roy has a heart-to-heart talk with Sara and encourages her to go through with the audition.
After learning what Chenille said to Sara, Derek confronts her about it, as well as explains his true reasons for dumping Nikki. Remorseful of her actions, Chenille admits that what she did was wrong and apologizes. She also tells Derek that Sara did not want to dump him, but Chenille's words hurt her to the point of feeling forced to leave him.
Chenille also admits that she has been resentful for how Kenny has been treating her, including not helping her raise their son and not being a good boyfriend to her. She unintentionally took it out on Sara since she has been jealous of her and Derek's relationship. Chenille encourages Derek to be with Sara, admitting that she knows that Sara is in love with him. She also warns Derek not to follow Malakai, knowing that he may lose his chance to attend Georgetown and his future if he is arrested. Derek meets up with Malakai and does his best to dissuade him from carrying out the attack, but Malakai refuses.
Derek arrives at a crucial point in Sara's performance to offer her encouragement and moral support. Afterward, Sara is accepted into Juilliard and rekindles her relationship with Derek. Meanwhile, the drive-by is botched and Malakai is arrested. The film closes as Sara, Derek, Chenille, and their friends meet at Stepps to celebrate Sara's successful audition.
Julia Stiles landed the role of Sara when director Thomas Carter saw her dance scene in the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You.[2] To prepare for her role, Stiles did two months of training for the ballet scenes while also rehearsing the choreography for the hip hop scenes.[2]Fatima Robinson was the film's hip hop choreographer.
The film's soundtrack was released on December 19, 2000, through Hollywood Records and consisted of hip hop and R&B music. The soundtrack was a huge success, and made it to several Billboard charts. It peaked at 3 on the Billboard 200, 2 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, 6 on the Top Soundtracks, 3 on the Top Internet Albums and 2 on the Canadian Albums Chart, and featured two charting singles "Crazy" and "You". Save The Last Dance went both gold and platinum on January 29, 2001, and was certified 2x multi-platinum on May 20, 2002. The soundtrack won the American Music Award for Best Soundtrack in 2002.[3]
Allmusic rated the soundtrack three out of five stars.[4] RapReviews rated it three and a half out of ten.[5]
"True Colors/Shining Through" (Theme from Save the Last Dance) – Fredro Starr featuring Jill Scott
The film debuted at number 1 at the North American box office making $27.5 million in its opening weekend. Though the film had a 44% decline in earnings the following weekend, it was still enough to keep the film at the top spot for another week. It grossed $91,057,006 in the US alone and $131.7 million worldwide.[6]
Home media
The film was released on DVD and VHS on June 19, 2001.[7] It was re-released on DVD on January 24, 2017.[8]
Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 53% approval rating based on 100 reviews, with an average score of 5.5/10 and a consensus: "This teen romance flick feels like a predictable rehashing of other movies."
Positive reviews praised the performances of Stiles, Thomas, and Washington.[9][10]Desson Howe of The Washington Post called Stiles and Washington appealing performers and concluded, "Thomas is the movie's best element. He puts so much authority in his performance, he makes this controversial romance seem like the best thing that could happen to anyone. That's no easy task."[11]
In a three-star review, Roger Ebert said that despite the film's clichéd story and romance, "the development is intelligent, the characters are more complicated than we expect, and the ending doesn't tie everything up in a predictable way."[12] Charles Taylor of Salon wrote, "for all its dumb clichés it offers the basic appeal of teen movies: the pleasure of watching kids be kids, acting as they do among themselves instead of how parents and teachers expect them to act."[13]
Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Mark Caro wrote, "On paper the movie is full of cliches recently explored elsewhere...Yet in this case the outline is not the story; the people who inhabit it are," and in this way, "Save the Last Dance triumphantly passes the audition."[14]
Negative reviews criticized the editing style of dance scenes, the film's "after-school special"-like subplot, and the script for not delving enough into the issues of interracial relationships.[15] Critic Wesley Morris wrote "the movie combines the worst of urbansploitation with the worst of teensploitation, and outfits them both in makings of the ultimate racial-crossover melodrama -- teen motherhood, deadbeat teen dads, drive-bys, a dangerous ex-girlfriend, speeches straight from the pages of Terry McMillan."[15]Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "director Thomas Carter is afraid to pump up the volume on its own interracial, hip hop Romeo and Juliet story, lest it challenge even one sedated viewer or disturb the peace."[16]
Legacy
Along with similar-themed teen movies from the early 2000s such as Honey, You Got Served and Stomp the Yard, the "dancing" in Save the Last Dance is almost uniformly derided as mediocre at best, and borderline offensive at worst; its characterization of "hip hop dancing" amounting to nothing more than random fingerpointing and being able to sit awkwardly in a chair has spawned hundreds of mocking memes on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.[17]
Additionally, the idea that outside of a movie plot an "audition" of such low caliber could get the dancer admitted to Juilliard is "ludicrous". As Karla Rodriguez from Complex Magazine pointed out in a twenty-year retrospective of the movie:
"We are sure Stiles worked really hard to learn the choreography for this scene and she deserves to be commended for her efforts—especially since the actress had no previous dance experience prior to the film and still did most of the dancing herself. But let's be honest: If it wasn't part of a movie, there's no way that dance number would have held up in real life and gotten her accepted into one of the most prestigious dance schools in the world. After all, the famous NYC school has an extremely low acceptance rate of 8%, beating out a majority of Ivy League schools. That figure makes the fine arts school harder to get into than Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania."[18]
In the December 9, 2023 episode of Saturday Night Live, comedian Chloe Fineman did Stiles' dance from the end of the film alongside Stiles in a surprise cameo.
