Culture

Directed by John Chu
Hoyts
1.5/5

The opening sequence of this third installment of the Step Up series is one of those candid camera interview montages, with the characters talking about what dance means to them. They’re speaking from the heart: there’s no doubt the people behind this film have a passion for dance. The myriad dance scenes in Step Up 3D are, accordingly, fantastic. It’s a shame about the rest of it, though.
   It feels like you’re watching a hyperactive teenage daydream – it looks great, everyone’s sexy and everything’s exciting, but the makers obviously have no idea how to come up with a plot or script: it’s cliché after painful cliché. A lot of it is so implausible it’s ridiculous: parts of the film have evidently been included just, y’know, because it’ll look good (an example: within the first ten minutes one of the characters jumps through a hot-dog stand mid-conversation and continues talking).
   The story: on his first day at uni, first-year Moose (Adam Sevani) reveals talent in an impromptu dance-off with a forbidding stranger. He then encounters the mysteriously sage Luke (Rick Malambri), who wants him to join his elite dance troupe, the Pirates. It turns out the forbidding stranger was in fact a member of the Samurai, the Pirates’ main competition in an upcoming dance contest. Luke reckons Moose has got the ‘spark’ that will help the underdog Pirates finally beat the Samurai.
   A couple of blah romances and lots of monologues about living your dreams are provided for interest alongside this original storyline. You find yourself longing for the dance scenes; wishing, in fact, that the makers had stretched them to the length of the running time. Thankfully, the finale delivers on the dance front, and almost mollifies you enough to forget the mess that came before it.