GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/14/07)

I understand that as the chief film critic for this website I really need to have a very generalized knowledge of contemporary cinema, but I can't, shall we say, front: I know very little about the genre, apparently a rather successful one, to which this picture belongs. I do know just enough about it to try to give it a name: I call it the "bring it/oh it's already been brought-en" film. It generally involves the tension between "street" or "popular" or "strip" dancing versus "proper" dancing, e.g. ballet or tap. It generally features a hero or heroine who is somehow suspended between those two worlds of dancing. And it generally ends with the representatives of established "proper" dancing getting either a comeuppance or Learning A Valuable Lesson, while the hero or heroine gets his or her bona fides in "proper" dance established. Some of these films involve competitions, sometimes competing competitions, competing competitions involving "street" and "proper" dance, which are happening at the same time, which our hero or heroine has to choose between.

Hmm. All right, for not having seen all too many such movies, it appears I have something of a feel for what they're all about. Here we have spunky Baltimore street kid Andie (Evigan, who's got an early Demi Moore vibe going on, only not as irritating) who's always skippin' school to hang out with her street dance crew, the 410, causing her foster mom to threaten to send her to live with her aunt in Texas. "The 410 is the only family I have left!" she cries, before sneaking off to yet another underground dance competition, where she runs into Tyler (Channing Tatum) in a cameo role. Aficianados of the "you better bring it" genre will remember Tyler as the street-rat turned dancer from 2006's Step Up, to which this film is a not-quite sequel. The now-successful Tyler tells Andie he can hook her up at a prestigious dance academy, and so her new life begins, sort of. Tensions between the discipline of "proper" dance and the peer pressure of her street crew, combined with the attentions of street-dance-cred seeking Chase, turn Andie's whole life into something, um, whickety-whickety-whack. Which would be fine, if the picture didn't so relentlessly recycle clichés that were stale from Fame to Flashdance and beyond, and combine them with improbabilities that strain credulity for no good reason. As in, the whole arts school is run entirely by Chase's thirty-something brother (Kemp), who also has time to be a dance instructor. That such nonsense was crafted by a couple of members of the WGA really has me wondering whether I was in the right side of the strike. Needless to say, by the time the picture showed its racist streak by having its plot violence instigated by its black characters, I was already well over it.

The reason for all this dull-to-offensive story stuff is, of course, the dancing, which has its moments but overall seems so calculated to impress that it loses all other reason for being. That is to say, it serves very little function other than to set up a close-up of the once skeptical Kemp looking at the action with a "maybe these hippity-hop kids are on to something" look on his face. "It's not where you're from, it's where you're at" is this movie's tagline. Step Up 2 the Streets is at nowhere.