Step Up

Step Up (2006) sets a street dancer in Baltimore against a ballet student at an arts school. Tyler has a record; after damaging a school building he is sent to do maintenance at that same school as a penalty. Nora is looking for a partner for her graduation showcase, and when hers is injured she has nobody. She sees Tyler dancing in a corridor. The story is entirely formula: two worlds, a performance, an obstacle, a finish. The film's business is not the story but the dancing. Anne Fletcher was a choreographer first; this was her first film as director. The camera does not cut the dance up; in most sequences the whole body stays in frame, which matters in this genre. Two vocabularies mix: street and ballet. The best scenes are where both are used at once. Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan met on this film. They later married and separated in 2018. Tatum was a model and dancer at the time; his acting career started here. The series continued to six films, with the later ones dropping the story entirely for the performances. It did very well commercially and was among the films that started the mid two thousands wave of dance pictures. It runs 104 minutes. Good for: dance films, teenage drama, and the mid two thousands. Less good for: the script is predictable and outside the dancing the film is thin.