Step Up 3D

In the sublimely cultural and highly kinetic universe of John Chu's Step Up 3D, people like dancing. As in, they really, really love it. It's set in a world where it seems that busting a move and winning break dance battles is practically the most important thing to every human being on the planet, living or dead. It's a lifestyle, one where a single toe out of line can discredit your respek 'n' shit and get your head chopped off and popped on a stake for all to gawk and laugh at as they drink your inadequate and incompetent blood. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little.

This obsession is true for our main characters, mainly young and athletic street dancers whose lives revolve one hundred and ten per cent around dancing. They live it, they breathe it, they digest it, they fart it, they everything it, and it always comes first for them. While their passion is fairly admirable, it's also a bit laughable. To hear characters taking these things so outrageously seriously is just stupid and unintentionally comical, leading to the film shooting itself in its exceedingly happy foot.

We follow two adolescent siblings, Moose (Adam Sevani) and Camille Cage (Alyson Stoner) who have just started attending New York University. Moose has promised his mother that he would never pursue his love for dance again, but after less than two minutes of screen time, he ends up in a break dance battle. That's right, this film hasn't heard of the word "pacing."

He respectfully wins and attracts the attention of Luke Katcher (Rick Malambri), an aspiring filmmaker and dancer, who introduces Moose to his dance crew, called Pirates. Arrrr, matey, they can twirl and do somersaults and do all sorts of freaky stuff. Moose joins the crew as they prepare for an upcoming dance competition, the World Jam contest, where they will be competing against their rivals, the House of Samurai dance crew. Pirates versus Samurais, eh? That sounds a lot more entertaining than it actually is.

For a lot of the movie we're watching our protagonists train and practice for this prestigious competition, all of which is quite fun. The choreography within these sequences is spectacular, oozing with creativity, aided visually by those 3D glasses you should be wearing. Most of it is typical street dancing, but a scene where Moose struts his stuff with Camille to a remix of Fred Astaire's "I Won't Dance" stands out from the crowd.

Dance is a beautiful art form and it's showcased very well here, but as much as it tries with all its strength to drag the film up from the depths of mediocrity, truthfully, nothing can. When the dancers stop moving their bodies, we have to deal with boring, melodramatic scenes with characters, ugh, talking.

The script by Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer is frustratingly cheesy, bursting with annoying exposition at the start and jam-packed with stupid cliches. With lines like "You wanna get to him, you gotta go through us" and "With a little bit of training, this kid could be the spark that we need to get everyone together and win the hundred grand from the World Jam and pay back what we owe," I can't say that they've put any effort into this whatsoever.

This isn't helped by the wooden acting from almost all of the cast, particularly Malambri. To be fair, many of the performers are professional dancers, not actors, so we're not expecting much, but that doesn't get them off the hook. The only good performance is from Sevani as Moose, our exuberant and passionate main character, yet even he's shaky at certain points in the film.

I also can't do this review without mentioning Martin and Facundo Lombard as The Santiago Twins, two of the most annoying on-screen siblings since Mudflap and Skids from Transformers 2. I spent much of Step Up 3D imagining I was bashing their pathetically unfunny skulls in with a baseball bat.

Many of the characters simply feel one dimensional, with significantly few of them having a noteworthy presence. Side characters will only be remembered as backing dancers and nothing more, as they lack distinct personalities.

What the film does have though is a cracking soundtrack, filled with hip-hop and electro-funk which ramp up each individual dance scene. From Flo Rida's "Club Can't Handle Me" to Chromeo's "Fancy Footwork," it really is great and sets the energetic mood.

I want to say that the film's heart is in the right place, but when our main character is told that dancing is more important than school, I have to say that the movie's morals are a tad questionable. The film is meant to show the emotional power of dancing, but this is nothing short of generic and it seems forced at times.

I would recommend Step Up 3D for fans of dancing, but thinking about this, they would still have to sit through the tedious scenes where the art is not being displayed. The dance sequences may be fascinating, but they aren't enough to compensate for the god awful script, the bland acting and the wafer-thin plot. Actually, hold on, just go on YouTube and search for clips of the best dancers on Britain's Got Talent. That should suffice.

5/10