From the writers of SAVE THE LAST DANCE and episodes of THE OC we get a teen romantic drama as formulaic and gauche as one might expect. Beefcake du jour Channing Tatum plays a Vanilla Ice-style inner city kid who trashes a school for the performing arts and gets landed with 200 hours' community service cleaning out dustbins. When Jenna Dewan's ambitious dancer gets stuck for a partner she recruits the rough kid and sparks fly. Unsurprisingly, ex-boyfriends turn out to be scoundrels, there's a last minute fracas as to whether the show will go ahead and all ends happily bar the gratuitous and melodramatic exit of a side character. This movie has neither the wit of SHE'S THE MAN nor the emotional pull and on-screen chemistry of DIRTY DANCING. Still, there are worse things in life for a teenage girl than looking at Channing Tatum in a wife-beater for two hours.
STEP UP was originally released in the US in August 2006 and in the UK in October 2006. It is now available on DVD.
"there are worse things in life for a teenage girl than looking at Channing Tatum in a wife-beater for two hours."
ReplyDeleteMy thought exactly.