I have a confession to make: I haven’t seen Step Up. To be completely honest, when I first saw the advertisement for Step Up 2, my first thought was that I don’t even remember there being a Step Up 1. Once I looked it up on IMDb, I remembered seeing a preview for the first film, but it just seems that there are so many of these street dance movies that have come out recently that it’s hard to keep track.

From the looks of it, Step Up 2 the Streets is not an actual sequel to Step Up, having no ties besides location—Baltimore—and a brief cameo by the main character of the original. The protagonist of this film is Andie, a troublesome teenager being raised by her mom’s best friend after her mom succumbs to cancer. Andie is involved with a “crew” and is skipping school and staying out all night. Her guardian can’t take it anymore and threatens to send her to live with her aunt in Texas unless she can earn a spot in MSA—Maryland School for the Arts.

She gets in, but her street-trained dancing skills aren’t exactly what the pretentious dean of the school is looking for. Fortunately, she has won the attention of the popular Chase Collins, the dean’s younger brother, who is fed up with his brother’s ideas of how the school should be run. After school causes Andie to fall out of favor with her “crew,” Chase convinces her that they should start their own crew. They recruit the rest of the school’s outcasts and start practicing.

The rest of the plot is very predictable, following the typical sports movie plotline: they practice hard, they fail, they try again, get beat up for their efforts, give up, and ultimately, win the big contest with the pretentious dean in the audience—and impressed. Oh, and boy and girl fall in love, of course.

It actually took me a few minutes into this film to realize that it was not a foreign film. I guess I’m a little out of touch with modern slang, particularly the street slang spoken here. You get used to it, though. Anyway, the movie is aimed at a specific audience that will understand the lingo and—judging from this preview screening—it’s a pretty sizable crowd. They seemed to enjoy it, so that’s good.

Personally, I didn’t get much out of this film. I can appreciate all the physicality and athleticism that goes into these vigorous dance moves, but it just doesn’t wow me like, say, Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Where’s Donald O’Conner when we need him? I’m not even sure how these dance contests are judged. It seems to me that the winner is the crew who dances to the longest song.

For the most part, the actors in the film were cast for their dancing skills rather than their acting ability, but they manage to hold up fairly well. The characters aren’t that deep, though—the same cliché characters you’ll find in most competition movies (i.e., underdogs).

There are a few laughs scattered throughout, but the drama is the overdone stuff of bad television shows. Still, the movie will succeed with its target audience; but it’s not going to pull in much more than that, nor should it.

Step Up 2 the Streets is rated PG-13 for “language, some suggestive material and brief violence.” The suggestive material comes from some risqué dance movies—grabbing of the crotch, and so on—and there’s really only one brief fight scene. So it’s mostly language and that’s pretty tame—what I understood of it, anyway.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of Step Up 2 the Streets.