Why "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights" Is Not a Great Movie

Before now, the only article I have written about the movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, was a 2017 blog article titled The Origin of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. That blog article was based on a radio interview with Peter Sagal who in 1998 had written a movie script about the real-life experiences of a young American woman who lived in Cuba during the late 1950s, when the Cuban Revolution happened. That script -- which did not include any music or dancing -- never became a movie, but several years later the script was rewritten to make the 2004 movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, which has some similarities to the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing.

Now I have re-read my 2017 blog article, and I read there that I had watched the movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights once, several years before 2017. Now, however, I have no memory that I ever had watched that movie until a few days ago, when I happened to notice it on my cable-television schedule. Based on my recent watching of the movie, I will share my thoughts about it.

In my opinion, the movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is a good movie, but not a great movie. Anybody who loves the great movie Dirty Dancing should watch also the good movie Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. 

(My wife watched Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights with me, and she thought it was a great movie.)

Here are a couple YouTube videos that show some of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.

The second YouTube video's soundtrack is different from the movie's soundtrack, but the video provides a good visual selection of the movie's scenes.

=======

Why isn't Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights a great movie? I offer two reasons.

-----

Reason 1

The female actress Romola Garai corresponds to the female actress Jennifer Grey, and the male actor Diego Luna corresponds to the male actor Patrick Swayze. Garai and Luna are fine actors, but they are about the same physical size. 

I don't care if a romantic couple comprises a man who is not significantly larger than the woman, but if you want to make a romantic movie that is great, then the actor lead must be significantly larger than the female actress. That size difference must be a principle of movie casting.

The producers of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights should have paid the six-foot-tall, untra-handsome Ricky Martin however much money was necessary to hire him for the male lead.

-----

Reason 2

There's too much politics in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. In particular, a few of the Cuban characters express a lot of resentment towards American tourists and businessmen. Maybe Americans deserved resentment and criticism from Cubans in those years, but the movie itself does not depict any American wrong-doing. 

(The hotel's Cuban employees are forbidden to socialize with the hotel's American but that is just a normal prohibition at hotels everywhere.) 

A movie's popularity in America will be limited if the movie includes a lot of gratuitous anti-American remarks.

Eleanor Bergstein's movie script included several political and ethnic remarks that were removed before the movie was finished. The removal of such remarks improved the movie Dirty Dancing.