Channingography, part 3: Step Up (2006)

 

After four movies that turned out way, way better than I expected, would Channing Tatum's filmography hold for the one that actually provided his breakthrough as a leading man and spawned a franchise that rivals the "Fast&Furious" series for longevity? Let's do the short version: no, the movie is shit. 

The long version starts with a synopsis. Tyler (Channing Tatum) is living as a foster child with a white trash family in some derelict part of the metropolis, spending his days dancing on cool backyard parties of the cool black criminals with his many black friends. When he and said black friends break into a private art school for the high society, Tyler gets arrested and sentenced to do communal service in said school to repair the damage. 

There, he meets Nora (Jenna Dewan) who is working on her final choreography for her exams. Unfortunately, her dancing partner gets injured, and so she recruits hesitant Tyler to fill in. Through a series of largely artificial obstacles the plot randomly throws at them, they fall in love and perform to gigantic success on stage, earning her a job as dancer and him a scholarship in the school. 

It's a dance movie, so there's not much to be expected in terms of story. This is a problem with the whole genre, which is as formulaic as it gets, but both "Magic Mike" movies showed how you could do it better: either do a real story, with characters and something to say like the first movie, or simply ditch the need for a story entirely and do a feel-good movie with some loosely connected, spectacular dance numbers. 

"Step Up" chooses the well-trodden middle path, which is the one that leads to disaster, in this case. There are many reasons for this, so let's disect them one by one. 

The least offensive one are the characters. They are all cutboard, but that doesn't need to be an obstacle if the rest of the movie works well enough. Tyler is a good guy (everyone says so, so it has to be true), his best friend Mac (Damaine Radcliffe) is the voice of the ghetto, Mac's little brother Skinny (De'Shawn Washington) gets reliably into trouble, Miles (Mario Barett) immediately connects with Tyler as the black guy at the fancy art school who didn't forget his roots, and so on and so forth. I'd call them one-beat, but that would be generous since most of these characters do not contain even a single beat to speak of. 

Then there's the plot itself, which is an incredibly random paint-by-numbers affair. These two sound mutually exclusive, but the paint-by-numbers job is the structural elements (love scene, fight scene, reunion scene, etc.) in the usual order, whereas the randomness comes from the actual plot beats connecting them, or failing to, more often. The stuff that is happening happens because the plot demands it, and people just do whatever is necessary. Or forget to do; Tyler is selflessly rescuing Mac and taking the sentence for it, but that fact is never brought up again, which one might assume it would when Mac quits their friendship because Tyler doesn't show up in time for basketball. 

This feeds into the problem of pacing. Nothing in this movie ever gets into a natural flow; the scene cuts are arbitrary and jump between several thin plot threads with no rhyme or reason, which is ironic given that we're watching a dance movie. 

But again, none of this would be especially out of the ordinary for this genre, which is a showpiece for beautiful people showing off beautiful choreographies. Unfortunately, the latter is missing as well. Aside from the final performance there's a dearth of asthetically pleasing dance scenes. Like with the plot, we get elements of them, but never until the end the real thing. Generously I could call this building tension towards the finale, but if that was the intent, the failure is pretty obvious. 

The most vexing thing about the movie, however, is the incredibly insulting social commentary. It starts with the fact that in a Hip-Hop dance movie, both main characters are white. This had to be an obvious problem for the film makers, because they try make up for it by boxing them in with a plethora of black best friends from all walks of life. The only other white characters of note are the antagonist (such as he is) and the principal of the school (female, because art school, and behaving like she was the social worker). 

When Tyler first moves through the hallways of this expensive elite schools, there are so many black people that you couldn't cast the whole of black Ivy League students to fill all the roles. We are informed that the school has an extensive scholarship program (of course), because we wouldn't want to strain realism now, would we? 

The underworld is also black dominated, of course. Tyler's best friends Mac and Skinny steal cars for sport and sell them to the guy who sponsors the best parties of the hood, and it's all treated as a natural pastime for them. The mother of Mac and Skinny is hard working, their father is absent, and if you think that this will lead to them getting caught up in an entirely random act of violence to pay lip service to this particular social ill, the movie has you covered! 

Privileged white girl Nora effortlessly starts a relationship with white trash product Tyler, whose foster father literally does nothing but get handed (!) his beer bottles by the hard-working wife and else abuse the social security system (subverting stereotypes about only black people being undeserving of social security, you see!). 

It goes on and on like that. Was this better in 2006 than it is now? I can hardly imagine. But this movie has the only saving grace of giving Channing Tatum a career. Else, it can go to the dustbin of history.