Step Up

There was a poster outside the screening for Step Up that featured a ticket stub from Save The Last Dance. Coincidence? Well, yes. But the comparisons are unavoidable. Channing Tatum plays a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, grudgingly serving a community service sentence in an arts school. There he falls for a ballet student (Jenna Dewan), and much street ballet and flirtatious brew-ha ensues.

Of course, this film is all about dancing and beautiful people. Considering many of the leads have been drafted in from their full time occupations as dancers and singers, this is quite fortunate. Tatum spends the first half hour uncomfortably sloping around the 'hood like the Second Coming of Snow; his sulking presence is a hollow effort to hang the whole movie on. Yet both he and a semi-naked Jenna Dewan seem to know that they're really just there to pout and bob around a lot. There are certainly no plot surprises in store, but the style and tone are spot on. The arts school buzzes with Fame-style energy and impromptu fits of dancing. The choreography itself should be enough to satisfy So You Think You Can Dance fans, and the extravagant waste of Rachel Griffiths as the whisperingly elegant school director adds an unlikely touch of class.

Step Up is straightforward enough to do the job for fans of such dance films. Everyone else might as well save the ticket cost.