A modest sequel to 2006’s surprise hit Step Up, Jon Chu’s imaginatively titled Step Up 2 the Streets follows in the footsteps of the earlier film (with which, outside of a Channing Tatum cameo, it has no connection) as well others in the recent bout of competitive street dance movies, Stomp the Yard and You Got Served.
How lucky we are to get one of these every six months; I always felt we missed out during the heyday of competitive street dance movies, the brief period in 1984 which brought us Beat Street, Breakin’, and that classic among classics, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. 24 years later, and there’s only one real difference: namely, are they really serious this time around?
The 1984 films may not be masterpieces, but they are time-capsule entries from their era, painting a gritty portrait of the year, employing a cast of real street dancers (who among us can ever forget Shabba-Doo or Boogaloo Shrimp?) and, apparently, other amateurs in the realm of filmmaking.
Step Up 2 the Streets gives us an urban landscape most reminiscent of recent Pepsi advertisements, with a good-looking, clean-cut teen cast ripped from TV’s The O.C.
I have no idea if street dancing has really made this unexpected comeback in recent years, but films like this completely fail to convince me.
Plot is as hopelessly cliché as one might expect, with Andie (Briana Evigan) leaving her street ‘crew’ to study dancing at the Maryland School of the Arts, torn between her roots and her future, falling for hunky Chase (Robert Hoffman).
Will she be thrown out of school for her wild street dancin’ antics? Can she prove herself against her old friends at the big dance-off?
We’ve seen it all before, and there’s absolutely nothing new here; it could only be more redundant if the characters banded together to save the old discotheque or pinball arcade from closing down (what would teens band together to save these days, anyway? Starbucks?)
Stone-faced, gravelly-voiced Evigan looks attractive enough but seems an odd choice for a heroine.
Dancing scenes are good but too short and over-edited, past the point where we might actually believe the dancers are actually, y’know, dancing.
