Ready, Set, Jump!

Step Up 3D

Directed by Jon Chu

Runtime: 107 min.

Kiss Me Kate in 1953 was the first 3-D movie musical, but its delight has lasted all these years because of its perfect score and exhilarating dance sequences, especially the Jack Cole-choreographed “From This Moment On,” where the performers spring across the screen not—tritely—at you. (It screens Aug. 15-16 at Film Forum’s upcoming 3-D series.) The new Step Up 3D is just the latest example of Hollywood’s current 3-D rip-off in which dancers—and the scam—jump at you. 

Step Up 3D—the newest of a craven franchise—isn’t really as good as the underrated 1980s diptych, Breakin’ and the superb Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogalo, with its memorable break moves by Shabba-Doo (Adolfo Quiñones) and Boogaloo Shrimp (Michael Chambers) immortalizing an original cultural moment. Step Up 3D takes the basic plot element of one dance troupe—featuring Luke (Rick Malambri) and Natalie (Sharni Vinson)—that battle squads of New York dancers, but it doesn’t have Channing Tatum’s lanky dancer’s beauty from the original film. 

Malambri and Vinson are here primarily to become the face of the contemporary dance competition trend (something less than Breakin’s cultural breakthrough). Their love story is emphasized to only show that white boys can dance. This is a commercialized betrayal of the street dance revolution on which those ’80s movies were based. It derives from MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew, which already expropriates and commodifies the subculture it pretends to celebrate. How She Move, by Ian Iqbal Rashid, offered more genuine ethnographic substance and atmosphere—even when it audaciously veered into the purely aesthetic. Plus, it debuted the dancer-actresses Tre Armstrong and Rutina Wesley (now better known for playing Tara Thornton on HBO’s True Blood), who were stronger performers than either Malambri or Vinson. 

As for the expropriation: The dances are often spectacular, though no more than in Chris Stokes’ You Got Served, which modernized the street dance subgenre. 3-D can’t erase Stokes’ innovation of making a screen shake when the light-as-air dancers landed with earth-moving force. The choreography here by Jamal Simms, Nadine “High-Hat” Ruffin and Dave Scott is full of meant-to-impress, undulating gymnastics. The unexpected tango segment, however, is merely a wacky inclusion and not oddly expressive like that remarkable street-to-ballroom, class-climbing tango in Dr. Dre’s music video “Been There Done That.” That wasn’t 3-D, but it meant as much as Kiss Me Kate.