Corbin Bleu gets dirty — literally — as he tries to shed his teen idol image in “Free Style,” the story of a determined young man who will stop at nothing to become a professional motocross rider.
Bleu’s acting chops are credible enough for the venue, but as “Free Style” moves on, it becomes ever clearer that the screenplay itself — not the what-did-you-expect outcome of the drama on which it centers — is what keeps the star from truly breaking out. Written by Joshua Leibner and Jeffrey Nicholson, the script fails to introduce any unique perspective and instead provides only a series of overworked clichés that Bleu would not have had to wander very far off the Disney Channel lot to find.
He plays Cale, the hardworking son of a single mother (Penelope Ann Miller), holding down multiple jobs as he takes on the role of the man of the house while also engaging in a beloved past time.
In the role, Bleu rather ably encapsulates the emotions his character is expected to exhibit — anger, sadness, pain, doubt, fear and joy —all while making them believable. In one scene, for instance, Bleu’s character is enraged after he finds his snobbish girlfriend (Tegan Moss) cheating on him with his motocross opponent (Matt Bellefleur). In a fit of anger, he bashes his car window and just before they engage in a physical confrontation police begin to arrive, sending Bleu’s character on a temporary high-speed chase with law enforcement.
Yet this could not overshadow the number of hackneyed scenes that followed. How many times can one watch someone break up with their supposed better half, meet someone new — at a restaurant in this case — but the timing is wrong, so they miraculously find each other by crossing paths in the not-so-distant future, and become an item only to have it stifled by a parent who thinks they have made the wrong choice in a partner. Or find that a mother has been keeping a father’s whereabouts a secret, and upon reconnecting with their long-lost parent, find that there is no rekindling. The list could go on.
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