I was expecting a fun disco adventure after all the great things that I had heard about “Saturday Night Fever”. However, this movie is anything but fun. Very little of it is actually about dancing, it’s more of a depressing drama about some very unlikeable characters. This movie is the disturbed brother of “American Graffiti”.

“Saturday Night Fever” follows the exploits of a young Italian-American paint shop clerk by the name of Tony Manero (John Travolta “Swordfish”, “Grease”). Tony and his friends spend their nights cruising the streets, going to the disco and acting like complete jerks but Tony his eye on the trophy for an upcoming dance competition.

This movie made Travolta a star. He gets to show off some impressive dance moves but Tony Manero is anything but interesting. I did not want this guy to succeed because he is so incredibly unpleasant. Tony’s friends are also very mean-spirited. Karen Lynn Gorney (“The Hard Way”) is only vaguely tolerable as Stephanie, who becomes Tony’s dancing partner. All the characters in this film are severely lacking in personality. They offer nothing more than accents. So many of the interactions between the characters are just awkward and unnecessarily aggressive. We see dinner table arguments, beatings and even rapes.

The best parts of “Saturday Night Fever” are undoubtedly the dance sequences but they are not even filmed particularly well. I was looking forward to the big dance competition at the end of the film but it’s incredibly anti-climactic. The fact that nearly all the songs used in the movie are by the Bee Gees becomes really repetitive. I just do not understand why this is such a popular movie and why it is so iconic. This was a really challenging movie for me to sit through as it feels so long. I had really high hopes for this flick but what I got was a nasty surprise.