Step Up 3-D! Or as someone with a brain might call it..
Step Up 2: The Streets. But this time... IN 3-D!
What do you want me to tell you about this movie? It is what it is. It's a no brainer dance movie. And I give the people who made this points for recognizing that and do not try to make Step Up 3-D be anything more or less than just a spectacular dance flick.
The plot of this movie is pretty much every run of the mill, "We need to dance/kung fu fight/sing to save some institution/orphanage/home/village from the bad guys who dance/kung fu fight/sing better than us" movie. Only this time, the director thought, "Hey! What if we took X-Men and made all the mutants dancers?"
It's about Moose who was in Step Up 3-D's precedent, moving to New York with his best friend, Tyler Gage's sister (who kinda has a thing for him) to study but ends up being adopted by a local New York filmmaker.dancer who brings him to live in this loft where he fosters a tight-knit group of dancers. But the group faces a financial crisis and are in danger of losing their loft to their arch-nemesis dance group. So they must do battle at some prestigious dance competition so they can win the money and save their loft.
Step Up 3-D is what you would call X-Men with dancers, only Adam G. Sevani is Kitty Pride, the mutant academy is some loft in New York and Prof Xavier is one of the Jonas Brothers. Everything that is non-dancing in this movie is whimsically laughable. The screenwriters clearly don't understand the basic concept of continuation in a film, resulting in Step Up 3-d to have some very very careless goofs.
For example, this dancing group is facing money issues right? "Oh, we're so poor, we're surviving on our passion alone, Oh, we're gonna lose the rent and we'll be homeless." The movie beats you over the head at how poor all these dancers are. But then in some scenes you see them dancers wearing expensive limited edition Nike shoes, they even have a fucking wall of boom box equipment ranging from Sony to Bose. And for poor kids, they dress really really really well. Like Gossip Girl well. Maybe if you get your pretty heads out your ass and sell all that useless shit, you could actually afford to meet your rent.
The writing and acting is dreadfully generic as it comes. But when the movie is showing it's dance scenes in full 3D effect, all that crap is easily forgivable. They really bring out their best in those dance sequences, all of them are memorable, innovative, contagious, dangerously electrifying and the best part is they get better and better with every dance scene.
The final dance number in this has to be seen in 3D. They come out with LED lights and start popping and locking and flipping with those lights blasting in your face. Absolutely amazing. But in comparison to the final dance scene in the second Step Up, it relied to heavily on a technicality level whereas the second Step Up was raw body movement.
And Adam G Sevani is great. He has a likable charm to him, he is a good actor and his dancing is really really sick. I like it that they made him the main character of the film instead of once again going for the generic white pretty boy and girl as the two leads, whom practically will be forgotten about long after the movie has ended. I just hope that Sevani doesn't paint himself into a corner where every movie he does do from now on is either a dance or a frat boy flick because he can do so much better than this. Indie comedy perhaps.
Step Up 3-D is enjoyable for the most part. And all the horrible acting, insurmountable gear-grinding narrative and bad writing can't derail this film from ringing it's sole message through, that the human body remains one of if not the most engaging big screen special effects there is.
RATING: 5.5/10
