If you're not in the target teen age range you won't find much to admire (except those bare bellies).
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Teen dance movies are a little like porno flicks or slasher movies. To get to what you really want to see, you often have to endure a lot of drivel: cardboard characters, cookie-cutter plots, and a script that's just an excuse to showcase the good stuff. And that leaves you wondering, Why not show MORE of the good stuff?
That's the case with "Step Up 2 the Streets." When the dancers are on, so is the movie. But then, unfortunately, there's the rest of it. With dance movies, the structure is always one of three things: A gotta-dance young person pursues his/her dream, despite one or more Debbie Downers grumbling they'll never make it, or a humdrum life and dead-end job that holds them back--as in films like "Flashdance" or "Breakin'"; or else a dancer and others compete at school or in a win-at-all-costs contest ("You Got Served"); or a would-be dancer is opposed and suppressed by one or more authority figures, whether it's Daddy in "Dirty Dancing" and "Billy Elliott," the sheriff in "Footloose," or a guardian and the head of the Maryland School of the Arts in this not-quite sequel to "Step Up" (2006).
I say "not quite sequel" because the director is new and the cast is different. But both films take place at the Baltimore "Fame"-like school of the arts, and both are opposites-attract tales about a troubled street dancer and a dancer who's classically trained. In "Step Up" it was a female "good girl" hooking up with a troubled street-dancing bad boy. This time it's Briana Evigan as the troubled street urchin who's being cared for (kind of-though we never see any evidence of it) by her late mother's best friend, who promised to raise her. Meanwhile, in the opening we see her doing a "prank" video dance on a subway car which combines street-dancing choreography with Fagin-style pickpocketing. Her guardian sees it, and says she just doesn't know what to do with the girl, though one thought instantly comes to mind: either she starts attending the Maryland School of the Arts and does well, or else she's being shipped off to Texas to live with an aunt.
Huh? Andie (Briana Evigan) looks like a college student, and is legally an adult. So how is this authority figure holding any sway? Then again, I guess she's supposed to be a high school student, and I guess it's as easy to get into a select performing arts high school as walking in the door.
Andie has been dancing with a street "crew" calling themselves the 4-1-0--a kind of combined street gang, terrorist group, and dance team, who we're told is the only "family" that Andie has. And yet, Mom's friend seems awfully nice, and always in control of Andie, so it's hard to fathom either Andie's sense of alienation or her need to rebel.
But we're not thinking about things like that when Evigan is onscreen. We're thinking about her midriff, which is bare throughout most of the film, with pants riding so low you wonder how the laws of physics keep them from slipping off. But it's an equal opportunity teen titillation film, because there's beefcake too. The 4-1-0 leader is pretty buff and takes of his shirt to showcase his own abs (and bling), but that's not where Andie's attention lies. She's instead drawn to cocky Chase (Robert Hoffman), the top student at the Maryland School of the Arts, a "player" who's the most popular and the most talented of the "kids" whose specialty is modern dance. But what he really wants to do is what Andie is doing: dance in The Streets. And I capitalize "the" because it's the title of a competition that takes place at a subterranean-looking dance club.
"Step Up 2 the Streets" is a curious film insomuch as it tries to have it both ways: "cool" and clean. Clearly, the target audience is high school aged viewers, and so every attempt has been made to hold the line for a PG-13 rating. The raunchiest language comes in a "West Side Story" moment when Andie's friend dresses her up and observes, "You've got titties!" And there's one brief episode of violence, when the 4-1-0 leader and his gang mugs Chase. Other than that, it's a pretty tame film, despite all the attitude that fills the screen. The thing of it is, some parents might object that the message being sent here is that it's okay to defy authority, and even okay to be expelled from school if it means "being true to your heart" and following your dream of winning The Street.
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[release]23734[/release]