Movie Review: Step Up 3-D

by KYW's Bill Wine --

With 3-D having stepped up like crazy this year, it was probably an inevitability that we'd have a Step Up 3-D dancing our way.

Hyped as the first-ever dance drama in 3-D, Step Up 3-D is set in New York City's dancing underground, where street dancers Luke (Rick Malambri) and Natalie (Sharni Vinson) team up with a New York University freshman named Moose (Adam Sevani) to enter a high-stakes showdown in competition with other ambitious hip-hop dancers.

The franchise's original -- Step Up (2006), starring Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan -- was a formulaic, spirited but simplistic, dance-floor romance.  It was followed by a 2008 sequel, Step Up 2: The Streets, which had little to do with its predecessor.

Installment number three, which adds the suddenly popular 3-D process to the mix, is an exuberant celebration of street dance that rallies obediently around its central ingredient.

The screenplay is just a mix tape of tired clichés. But the dance segments, high-octane and frequent, are impressive, even if the gravity-defying acrobatics do eventually become routine enough to nearly border on tiresome.

Malambri's Luke, a wannabe moviemaker, runs a nightclub and dance studio in a Brooklyn warehouse. Romantically involved with Vinson's Natalie, a new member of his street-dancing team, The Pirates, he's also struggling financially to meet the mortgage while the bank threatens to foreclose.

So he challenges his own dance team to enter the upcoming hip-hop World Jam and compete against their rivals, The Samurai, for the $100,000 prize money.

Director Jon Chu, whose début film was the first sequel, structures this followup like a sports flick, with training montages leading up to a climactic confrontation on the dance floor.  He keeps his camera at a respectful distance from his dancers so that we can appreciate their skills, and takes advantage of the 3-D process (standing, in this instance, for "dance, dance, dance") by having his dancers jumping out at us throughout their routines.

The dance sequences are elaborately staged and, for the most part, entertaining to watch and easy to admire. It is, in fact, the dancers dancing that are the true special effects here.

And Chu even has the nerve to use a Fred Astaire song as background music for a dance number that he actually manages to make his own without seeming either pretentious or plagiaristic, and mounts a dance-number climax that Busby Berkeley would have admired.

However, the shallow, cliché-riddled script by Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer, perhaps inspired by A Chorus Line, offers a timeline that's downright nonsensical, and is certainly not kind to these inexperienced thespians, as it keeps reminding us that the dancing isn't being supported by other respectable production values.

When we're watching these actors act, it's often downright painful, although the two leads are natural enough. But there is some outrageously amateurish acting on display among the supporting cast that makes us look forward to the next dance number long before we should, so clunky is their dialogue and so wooden their delivery.

So we'll dance to 2 stars out of 4 for a watchable but leaving-us-wanting-less dance flick. 3-D is about the only element that Step Up 3-D does indeed step up to.