Step Up: Critic Reviews

Step, under the sure hand of director-choreographer Anne Fletcher, quickly discovers its own virtuoso charms.

A rough Baltimore kid, armed only with a killer smile and hip-hop moves, falls for a classically trained dancer in another retread of Footloose.

This is a cliche-ridden movie by people to whom formula is clearly mother's milk.

For a movie about dancing, Step Up is pretty clumsy on its feet.

Alas, most of Step Up takes place away from the dance floor.

Alive with infectious rhythm, likable characters, and slick dance moves, Step Up gives cliches a good name.

Fletcher ably blends ballet and hip-hop, but the filming itself is often clumsy, and Tatum's relentless African American impersonation quickly wears out its welcome.

Step Up barely bothers to build a memorable story. Instead, the movie rests entirely on the well-sculpted shoulders of charismatic leads Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan.

It's hard to feel the fire in Step Up because of how stars Jenna Dewan and Channing Tatum dance: separately. The movie lacks the pairs dance sequences that show how romance moves.

It's the storytelling that keeps landing on its keister.

Step Up is about following the teen-dance movie recipe without variations, right up to the big finale. By then, Wake Up would have been a better title.

While predictability and occasionally wooden dialogue keep this from being a truly good movie, it's certainly entertaining enough to please its intended audience.

Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.

We don't see any of those footprints that dance teachers arrange on the floor to show students where to step, but we certainly can see the handwriting on the wall in terms of where this movie is going.

Aside from the dance steps, you've seen it all before.

The cast of mostly unknown actors, who can all really move and sing, are given a story that doesn't make sense and lines that are boring at best and nonsensical at worst.

The well-cast leads are more than appealing enough to encourage a rooting interest. Better still, they obviously do their own dancing, and do it very well.

Step Up is so predictable, with every scene loudly announcing what the next one is going to show, that teens in the audience will take lots of breaks to text each other on their phones.

It's almost as wrong-headed as it is pre-fabricated.

Step Up sprints over its own soggy foundation of dance movie cliches with the sheer exuberance of its propulsively cut dance sequences.

Until the movie stumbles under the weight of its noble intentions and its tediously formulaic story, it delivers a few lively, well-shot dance sequences and some winning moments.

Predictable in every respect, the story line mainly serves as an excuse for a series of exuberant dance routines, thankfully choreographed by Fletcher to show off the dancers' entire forms rather than just flashing body parts.

You can sort of see the appeal of Step Up, especially during the dead of summer. It's totally mindless eye candy.

Cliched dance movie with some fun moves.

The dance numbers are high octane, and the characters are likable enough to make us want to hang with them through a plot we've seen so many times before it's like movie muscle memory takes over.