As surprising as it may sound, “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights”, the sequel to one of the Eighties’ most groaningly memorable joyrides, is not a side-splittingly awful movie that simply begs to have a torch taken to each and every one of its prints until the last ten minutes. One would have assumed the jig would be up immediately, or, more generously, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes into the film.

To my astonishment: not so. If nothing else the film answers a question that has surely been on the minds of moviegoers for many long years. Those wondering what happened to Patrick Swayze can take comfort in knowing that he’s found gainful employment. Turns out he was running a small dance studio in Havana for girls who need to open the delicate flower of their sexuality. While the work has kept his body fit, and certainly his skills as a thespian have not diminished one iota, it’s reassuring to know he had the time of his life on the first go-round.

If there is any justice, the career of his counterpart in this film, Diego Luna (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”), will not suffer as horribly as Swayze’s. Poor Diego! There isn’t a frame of this film that he doesn’t almost singlehandedly rescue from a script lost in a quicksand of mawkishness, mostly with his winning smile (lipless, triangular, endearing). In a welcome change from the original film, Luna’s Xavier, unlike Swayze’s older hunk, is a young man who looks to be about 120 pounds soaking wet. His role in this movie stands out because he has the one thing no other character does: innocence. Yes, Xavier is that rarest of breeds in modern cinema—rarer, perhaps, than the black serial killer—a teenager who looks, sounds, and acts like...a teenager.

Certainly that doesn’t describe his partner in this tepid pas de deux that owes less to Astaire and Rogers than it does Dr. Dre videos. Look no further than Katie for the new exemplum of the modern adolescent. Her role in the family unit is not to be seventeen—that’s so done—but rather to provide a positive example of spiritual, sexual, and intellectual balance from which the other children learn to be adults and the adults learn to be children. Katie is a modern girl in a film masquerading as a period piece (it’s supposed to take place in 1958), and this is the most disappointing disparity between this film and its predecessor, which drew its dramatic tension from the mores of the Fifties.

The contrast does, however, tell us something about contemporary culture: how easy it is to become a woman in the Age of Spears! As we watch her fast ascent to womanhood (bobby socks and ponytails to spaghetti straps and high heels) there are none of the bummers that used to plague adolescents in older, obsolete societies, such as unfulfilled yearning, secret transgressions, innocence lost, side one of “Led Zeppelin IV”.

Instead, so ripe is Katie that when Xavier rounds the corner to home base, she has eagerly (and expertly) undone half the buttons on his shirt. The trip from Barbie dolls to “Sex And The City” gets ever shorter, it seems. All of this in the form of an actress, Romola Garai, whose performance evokes not so much Jennifer Gray’s in the original as Elizabeth Berkeley’s in “Showgirls”. Part of the problem is casting. We’re told this plucky underdog is a Radcliffe-bound nerd who loves Jane Austen and dreams only of college, but in fact she’s a big shallow tomato who, by Fifties standards, would qualify as a bombshell. Katie’s a Cliffie like George W. Bush is a Yalie.

In her bump-and-grind to become a woman she has ample assistance from her father. Paul Slattery’s performance brings new age permissiveness into clear focus. For here is a paragon of modern John Doe parenting who seems to regard things like punishment as the quaint prejudice of an earlier epoch. Initially I thought Slattery was just a bad actor. By the end I realized that he was playing the part exactly right: the character himself is unconvincing. He’s  a gutless wallflower who exhales cigar smoke like he’s spitting watermelon seeds, ends brutal arguments with a big hug of affirmation, and allows his daughter to leave in the middle of the night to go and have sex with a boy he doesn’t approve of—on the condition that she doesn’t lie about it. Fathers like this would have put Elvis out of work. I’d pay good money to see a sequel in which Katie is adopted by Jerry Orbach, just to watch her mewlish face melt in tears when he grounded the little tart for a month.

The continuing infantilization of sex also spills over into politics. Now, a rule of thumb is that it’s pointless to explore the politics of a film whose novelization is printed in twenty-point Arial. Still, I was fascinated by the filmmaker’s use of revolutionary Cuba as a backdrop, for this, too, is an interesting comment on modern pop culture. With the total takeover of hip-hop, there is a free pass given to Third World revolutionaries, Castro and Che Guevara in particular. Words like “Cuba” or “Cuban” are exchanged like prized currency in this film; anything that is Cuban or, more precisely, not the world of white suburbia, is highly and self-evidently attractive (in one scene Xavier compliments Katie by saying, “You look so...” “Cuban?”  “Yes, Cuban!”) Violent revolution is taken about as seriously as pimples. Nothing threatening can spoil Katie’s life because war is what happens to other people.

Near the end, for instance, when Katie rushes to meet Xavier against the backdrop of popular revolt, she’s spared any anxiety by a thoughtful Cuban who gets on the hotel’s loudspeaker to inform his white patrons that “Batista has fled the country! But there is no danger!”. When revolution is reduced to a symbol of youthful rebellion as harmless as James Dean’s red jacket, we have reached a new stage in political vacuousness.

Or have we? The audience with which I saw this film, comprised mostly of teenage girls, began laughing sporadically right about the time it took its last, fatal nosedive, after a love scene which culminates in Garai murdering a sweet nothing to Xavier: “I’m glad I could see all this with you”. (“All this”? Meaning armed insurrection?) The girlish laughter kept going—sometimes in titters, sometimes in gales—almost continuously until the end credits appeared. Rarely have I heard an audience pass a guilty verdict so unanimously and with such cheery derision. I can only hope other teenagers will agree.

The corny ending might have been deliberate, of course. Dance flicks often enjoy the immortality that goes with being tagged Camp Classics. The dumber the better, as long as you can shake your hips. But “Havana Nights” fails even in that regard, chiefly because the dancing is flavorless and anemic. Had it stayed the course of mediocrity, riding Luna’s shaggy likeability, it would have at least had the virtue of unity. On the other hand, had its entire running time been as quotably campy as the last ten minutes, it would surely have a long life as a midnight movie to make John Waters mad with envy. Neither is the case, and if the careers of these actors follow those of their predecessors, Swayze’s going to need a bigger dance studio.