‘The X Factor’ UK review: Sam Bailey, Tamera Foster, and Hannah Barrett take on movie hits

Are you ready to see the stars of “The X Factor” attempt to light up your TV sets with songs from the silver screen? That is the theme for tonight’s show, which comes greatly hyped and with predictions that it could be a rough one for Sam Callahan and Miss Dynamix. It was also one where you would get an opportunity to see if this girl group was going to get a real chance to bounce back following the illness last week.

Last week, there was also a shock in the Flash Vote as Kingsland Road was put in the bottom 2. We will have the results of tonight’s vote soon in another article, as this one is all about the performances of the night.

Rough Copy, “Everything I Do” – A bizarre song choice for the group, since this is one of the cheesier songs out there, but these guys have a quality where they can make almost anything sound pretty current. They really are Boyz II Men incarnate! The only real critique that we have here is that half of the song was all choir, and we really don’t know how they actually sang during it.

Sam Callahan, “All I Want Is You” – We’re sure that there will be a good majority of people out there instantly offended when we say this, but we’ve never heard of this song. But from this standpoint, Sam was slurring his words a little too much, and he sounded slightly behind at times. But while we think that most of the ladies are concentrating on something other than his voice, there is a singer somewhere in there that occasionally comes out.

Hannah Barrett, “Skyfall” – The great thing about Hannah is that you almost don’t need to do anything other than to sit back and listen to her voice. We knew that she would nail this, and how often can you genuinely say this about a performer on this show actually covering Adele? This is a near-impossible song to do, and she does it very well. The only thing that she needs to work on is her personality on stage after the show improves.

Nicholas McDonald, “In the Arms of An Angel” – What in the world is Louis Walsh doing tonight when it comes to his song choices? We all know that Nicholas can sing a song like this, but is this going to get a single person his own age actually voting for him. He runs the risk of being boring.

Abi, Alton, “Moon River” – And the harshest critique of the night goes to… Abi? We don’t think that she was nearly as terrible as the judges made her out to be, and we blame this more on the producers for deciding to put one on sleepy song after another one. It’s impossible to really expect people to keep their attention spans together long enough to be able to legitimately enjoy both of these, right?

Miss Dynamix, “Dreams” – Nicole Scherzinger spent at least a good minute trying to come up with some sort of nice way to say this, but we’re going to give it to you straight: This was horrendous. This was one of the worst performances we’ve ever seen on the live shows. There is no chemistry with the group, and you almost get the sense that they know it. You can’t just expect to put a group together every year and have it work, and this one didn’t.

Sam Bailey, “My Heart Will Go On” – What a crazy story Sam had about this song. She originally performed this years ago while working on a cruise ship, but after a horrible experience she shelved it, vowing to never perform it again. Well, times have obviously changed here, and she took it on for tonight’s show. And, this was sensational. We could literally listen to an entire show with just Sam singing and be happy. She has to at least be in the finale, please? Thanks.

Kingsland Road, “Oh, Pretty Woman” – Typically, we find ourselves siding with Gary more than we do any other judge / mentor on this show. So with that in mind, where in the world did this mess of a song choice come from? The guys did about as good at it as they possibly could have, but it was still a bogus song choice.

Luke Friend, “Kiss From a Rose” – Another questionable song choice. What’s happening here? The truth here about Luke is that he’s a good performer, but probably the most limited singer out of everyone still in the competition. If he wants to avoid being exposed, he needs to do more upbeat rock performances. This is the sort of thing that could get him in trouble with the Flash Vote … maybe. Miss Dynamix was still much worse. Apparently, the judges disagree with us.

Tamera Foster, “Listen” – This song is hokey and overdone, and there’s no way around that in our mind. But with that being said, it was a pretty good performance of it. There were only a couple of flat notes during it, but that is not too bad really when you consider the challenge level that she was facing here. We do wish that the stylists gave her a different dress, so we didn’t spend much of the time being afraid that she was going to fall over on the stage.

Overall, a questionable night on “The X Factor.” Some good performances, but also a ton of questionable ones. There is no shortage of acts that can go home after this night. Grade: C+.

Who was your favorite from tonight’s “X Factor” UK performance show? Click here if you want to see our full rankings for this weekend’s show, and as promised, we will be back soon with the results.

Photo: ITV