Reprising the franchise’s surefire money-minting strategy, Step Up Revolution detonates five or six hyperkinetic dance extravaganzas in dazzling 3-D, timed to obliterate a traditionally saggy storyline. In the Step Up mythology, dreamers, losers and misfits always pull themselves up by their bootstraps, hoofing their way out of mean streets to fame—e.g., prizes, dance scholarships, Nike contracts. It’s a showbiz fairy tale as old as the movies; what’s surprising is how successfully this stale slice of the American Dream sells, in a marketplace supposedly dominated by the hip-kid demographic.
But, then, Step Up ticket buyers might just crack wise(ly): “It’s all about the dancing, stupid!”
Here, the story hook is the threat of a big development company wiping out a downscale, multi-ethnicMiami neighborhood. The sons and daughters of this poor but happy community—bathed in warm gold-and-orange light and hot salsa—want to save their home, while the CEO’s kid yearns to dance her way out of her white-and-gray world, where practical-minded dad (Peter Gallagher, slumming) would like to freeze-frame her into a corporate cog. Loosed in various urban venues, the high-energy kinetic power of The Mob, a diverse community of flash dancers and performance artists from the hood, eventually dissolves all differences, creating one big happy family.
Go for it at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/step-up-revolution/
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