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Step Up 2 the Streets

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: PG-13
Current Showtimes: No showtimes available

Step Up 2 the Streets suffered from what I like to call “preview robbery". Definition: when a preview shows you everything the movie has to offer, and then steals your money by not showing you anything else come viewing time. The preview seemed to advertise an entertaining movie - one with hip-hop music, meaningful characters and unique dance sequences. And it does... but only enough to make that two-minute preview. There are 96 other minutes of grade-D filler to hatchet through before you arrive at any type of clearing.

The only way Andie (Briana Evigan) can express herself is through dancing on the streets of Baltimore. Which is why she’s so distraught when her guardian threatens to send her to Texas if she doesn’t get her life on track. Consequently, she enrolls in a Juliard-type school where she can’t seem to fit in with all the prep school ballet dancers. It’s there that she meets Chase (Robert Hoffman), one of the members of the school’s founding family. He too is fed up with the structure of the school, and the two use the school’s resources and people to start an underground, ‘illegal’ dance crew.

It wouldn’t have been so painful if this plot line wasn't beyond cheesy. There’s not even a word for the level of overused, trite, redundant dialogue and conflict the movie regurgitates. And its main problem is its melodrama. We have the guardian who is having severe difficulties controlling her “out-of-control” dancing foster child. We have the prep school professor who just doesn’t understand the idea of expressing oneself through the art of street dancing. And we have the rival dance team who “owns” the underground dance scene and won’t let any ‘outsiders’ participate. Of course, in the end (after Andie’s crew performs an admittedly decent rain dance) all three of these ‘obstacles’ come around to pretty much say, “You go girl!”

Ha! If there weren’t so many belly buttons, it might as well have been a Disney movie.

The only redeeming quality Step Up 2 had was its choreographed dance sequences, which, consequently, are the reason most of you will be going to this film in the first place. But until Joe’s decides to host a backroom ‘street’ competition... just stick to Michael Jackson YouTube videos.