Step Up

Tyler Gage (Channing Tatum) is a hip street dancer with attitude and a weakness for breaking and entering. Nabbed while trashing a school of arts, he’s sentenced to perform his community service there. Pretty ballet dancer Nora (Jenna Dewan), meanwhile, is desperate to find a new dance partner, but all the candidates are wimps. Hmmm, where could she find a strong, manly man who’s easy on the eye and light on his feet? Like many films in the romance/dance genre, ‘Step Up’ makes a virtue of its predictability, setting the stage for a dream scenario and fulfilling the wishes of its young audience. But while Tatum has rough charm, Dewan is more dancer than actress, and most of the peripheral characters – as they would put it – suck (Rachel Griffiths almost visibly grits her teeth throughout her dull turn as school principal). Several dance scenes are fantastic, but with its wooden dialogue and pedestrian plotting, this is more ‘Save the Last Dance’ than ‘Footloose’.