Deborah Lipp

Step Up (2006) 7/10
Tyler (Channing Tatum) is a street kid who loves to dance. Nora (Jenna Dewan) is a dance major at the Maryland School of the Arts. When Nora’s dance partner is injured, Tyler steps in, fusing his hip-hop style with her formal training.

Step Up aims to be this generation’s Fame, although it has more in common plotwise with less thrilling fare. It combines exciting, terrific dancing with the thinnest of plots, engineered by the same software that engineers every Michelle Trachtenberg movie.

Let’s be clear: I’m recommending this movie. If you enjoy dance, you’ll enjoy it. It uses real dancers, which weakens the acting, but makes the dance worth watching. It pulls back from the MTV style of rapid-cutting long enough to really show you the dance; we see the bodies, the feet, the moves. It has a veneer of authenticity, and you can take your kids.

But let’s also be clear that the veneer of authenticity is as calculated and formulated as everything else. It all comes from the test-marketing.

Tyler breaks into the School of the Arts and trashes the place. He is sentenced to community service at the scene of the crime, thus affording the opportunity to meet Nora. But it seems that a break-in and vandalism would make Tyler an unsympathetic character, so the crime is elaborately engineered to maximize his essential innocence. Tyler is with his friend Mac and Mac’s kid brother Skinny. Horsing around, they accidentally break a window. Skinny goes in through the window, forcing the brother, and then Tyler, to reluctantly follow. They find the school theater and are astonished by the set dressing. When they accidentally break something, they decide the “rich kids” at school won’t mind and continue to trash the place, all while having big fun with costumes and such. Accident-reluctance-accident-playfulness, and finally, to nail the lid onto the audience’s sympathy, Tyler lets himself get caught so that Mac and Skinny can get away.

Everything in the film is as carefully engineered as that scene. There’s crime and violence, but it’s bloodless and impersonal. There’s romance, but it comes down to some very innocent kissing palatable for an eleven-year old.

In fact, I’d suggest the test market is white eleven-year old girls. Why? Well the innocence, the costumes, the otherwise inexplicable presence of a cute kid sister of about that age in Tyler’s foster home. I say white because of the very subtle racism, or to put it more gently, racial attitude, in the movie. In a largely black cast, Tyler and Nora are white. The people seen actually instigating crimes are all black, and by the end of the movie, all inter-racial couples have broken up in favor of white-white or black-black matches.

But we expect happily-ever-after and a complete absence of social sensibility in a teen dance movie. This is an effective movie; it communicates the love of dance and music, and it’s fun to watch.