Admiration must be paid to a movie like Step Up Revolution. It promises dancing and, wow, does it deliver.
No shortchanging here.
I've reviewed all the Step
Up movies, almost always with wanton disregard for the actual dancing,
which is frequently undercut by the atrocious acting or sloppy writing. Maybe
I'm lightening up, or perhaps this Step
Up is just a better movie, but I found it less grating than the others.
Parts of it were even enjoyable. (Insert gasp
here.)
This Step Up begins
like many of the others: dancers are still spontaneously overcome by their
joint-cracking, muscle-tearing dance moves. There's Boy Dancer and Girl Dancer
and one of them always has a big audition that looms over the final 20 minutes
of the movie. Boy Dancer usually has to teach Girl Dancer how to do a special
dance move, which means he has to put his hands in some especially scandalous PG-13 zones and before long
they're kissing on the dancefloor. After four movies of this, the plots really
must write themselves.
Boy Dancer here is Sean (Ryan Guzman) and he works at a swanky Miami Beach hotel. Sean
and his buddies sabotage public gatherings with their pre-planned flash mobs. They
take over busy Miami
intersections, art museums, cocktail parties and skyscraper lobbies. They call
themselves The Mob and they make no attempt to distance themselves from
organized crime. The mafia apparently don't dance. I don't blame the movie for this oversight because, after all,
these kids have one-track minds — every second of their lives is devoted to
dance.
Step Up Revolution
suggests flash mobs are performance art. That may be true, but the ones shown
in the movie are some of the weakest forms. Flash mobs are less about the
performers and more about the audience, especially the random pedestrians who
open themselves up to personal discovery within the public spaces they occupy.
People go to the theater for live shows, but with flash mobs the performance
comes to them without warning, and by doing so it invokes a deeper commitment from
the audience to watch, to participate and to interact. If this medium interests
you, Google the flash mobbers Improv Everywhere. This is a group — with its
black-tie beach parties, pants-less subway cars and frozen train stations —
that is taking flash mobs into the realm of performance art. Rarely do they
dance.
But here in Step Up
Revolution, flash mobs are more ego-driven — "Hey, look what I can
do!" They rarely involve the audience other than to fill the background.
Does this make the dancing — mixtures of popping, breaking, krumping and random
bits of everything else — any less effective? No, but Step Up has no clue what a real flash mob is.
Anyway, Sean teams up with his Girl Dancer, Emily (Kathryn
McCormick), to take on a big corporation that plans on building a new hotel
mega-fortress right where The Mob happens to practice and hang out. As it turns
out, Emily is the daughter of the CEO, which adds lots of family drama to an
otherwise banal "corporation is evil" plot. They often find themselves dancing to bass-heavy dubstep, which dates the movie for time and all eternity in 2011, with its humping fax machines and dial-up screech.
People who enjoy dancing will approve of Step Up Revolution. And why shouldn't they? It's a wall-to-wall
dance movie with many locations, a variety of dance styles and hundreds of
talented dancers. I can't tell you if the dancing is technically challenging
or innovative, but it looked impressive on a big screen as people twisted and
turned, flipped over each other, slid under legs and, at one point, catapulted
off the hoods of hydraulically-operated lowriders. I didn't mind all this
high-octane spazz-dancing, but it did make me miss the grace of say Fred
Astaire, Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly. Few dancers impress me like the greats.
You're reading my review correctly if you've understood my appreciation for this movie as a guilty pressure, so-bad-i'ts-good sorta thing. But Step Up does make a
fatal error, though, one that is very hard to overlook. The whole movie is
spent bashing corporations and their villainous pursuits of profits, even if it
means crushing Granny's house into dust to put up one of those pools with a bar
that extends below the water line. But at the end of the movie — right after
The Mob finds out if they've saved the old neighborhood or not — an ad
executive tells them he likes their work. "I do ads for Nike. We want to
take their advertising in a new direction. What do you say you join us?"
One dancer can barely contain himself: "Where do I sign?"
Nike is a huge corporation, one that has proudly sent almost all
of its production to other countries, where claims of child labor, human rights
violations and sweatshops have persisted for the last 20 years. By introducing
Nike to the conversation — and then having The Mob accept it against their
better judgment — it devalues the entire undercurrent of revolution in the
movie.
What we need to do is flash mob the flash mob. Someone has to put
a stop to their greedy corporate pursuits.
