Review: Just 'Step Up' and dance!

Step Up 3D (U/A)
Director: Jon Chu

Cast: Rick Malambri, Adam G Sevani, Sharni Vinson, Alyson Stoner
Rating: ***

 

If Step Up 2: The Streets raised the bar for dancing finesse, Step Up 3 takes it a notch higher. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself running to the nearest dance studio to enrol in the hope of beginning to imitate even a quarter of what you have just witnessed on screen.

Of course we all know what dance means to dancers, how it is their very life, and so on, but asserting it every so often gets annoying. The cast here does exactly that through the movie. But the moment it gets down to business, you are willing to forgive all the talk. The performers then breathe, eat, drink, sleep, and fight street jazz, robot rock, lock, pop, and what not.

The story line may not be the film's strongest point, but that’s not what you look for in a dance movie anyway, right? All you want to do is sit back and enjoy the mechanical, almost unbelievable movements unfolding on screen. Step Up 3 makes the effort of inserting an underlying romance between the robotic moves of “great dancer” Moose (Sevani) and his “good dancer” best friend Camille (Stoner), Luke (Malambri), and love interest Natalie (Vinson). A little love never did harm a film.

 

So here we are at New York University. Moose and Camille are going to study electrical engineering. (Moose and Camille were seen in Step Up 2: The Streets and Step Up, respectively.) You just know that NYU is just another place they will start showing what they have got, engineering be damned.

 

Predictably, Moose is sucked into the street dance scene faster than you expected when he wins a dance battle. Our talent scout Luke (girls, try focusing on what he is saying, even if his good looks make it difficult) has been bequeathed a nightclub and an eccentric attic-cum-rehearsal room that shelters an eclectic mix of nomadic footloose characters who have followed him to realise their dancing dreams. Pirates they are. With the vault’s wall full of trainers and sponge fortification, and high-class music systems at their disposal, the Pirates will stop at nothing but a win.

They are all preparing for the “biggest battle ever”, the World Jam, their ticket to fame and $100,000 that will save their dance studio from the prying eyes of rival and villain Julien (Joe Slaughter), also a dancer. Pirate Luke must overcome Samurai Julien’s evil plans for him, to win the World Jam (a contest you already know they are never not going to win.)

 

The logically off-balance Step Up 3 feeds off the dance fever, clearly aimed at teens and tweens wanting to emulate Moose and the B.FAB (Born From A Boombox, that’s what the Pirates call themselves). The 3D cinematography is excellent. The dancers weave abstract stories, successfully captivating the audience. The most engaging and different is Moose and Camille’s one-shot sequence to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s ‘I Won’t Dance’ where the couple put up an impromptu show using dustbin lids, a water hose and couch as props.

The thumping soundtrack reverberates in your head long after the dance sequences die out. You will probably walk out of the cinema hall humming residual tunes of T Pain’s ‘Take You Shirt Off’ or Astaire-Ginger’s ‘I Won’t Dance’.

So spectacular is the celebration of dance and music that you suspend disbelief and just sit back and enjoy what unfolds before you. Step Up 3 is a complete entertainer. Dance enthusiasts, you cannot miss this one.