A pair of star-crossed dancers in New York find themselves at the center of a bitter rivalry between their brothers' underground dance clubs.
Writer/Director: Duane Adler
Stars: Derek Hough, BoA, Will Yun Lee.
Napoleon Dumo ... choreography
Tabitha Dumo ... choreography
Yako Miyamoto ... taiko choreography
Bree Wasylenko ... assistant choreographer
Watched online, ok print.
7 songs in the Soundtracks.
My rating is really 5, but I feel that I should like this better, and speculate it may be my mood, but I don't think so.
This is the sort of dancing I like: TAP fused with hip-hop and modern. But it's filmed badly: partial bodies, bad angles and too many cuts. Maybe I'm extra angry because it was tap, and I want to see it, but they take it away from me.
None of the hip-hop was terribly athletic; I don't remember any anti-gravity moves and the little bit of ensemble movement was a) only 3 guys, b) shown as DH selecting guys from the audience and c) filmed from angles that deprived us a proper view. Did they really have so much going wrong that they had to choose the cr@ppy angles/distances, or are they being "artsy"?
The story is useless, and the characters don't inspire me to care. But if it had enough good dancing, well shot, I would at least say 6. The choices really frustrated me.
This writer/director wrote all 5 of the Step Up films, but this is his 2nd of 3 directing efforts, all of which have IMDb ratings in the 5.* zone.
Rated 5.7 (2,900)
indie, dir. Adler; 6-
