The Step Up series was never anything to write home about. From its very inception it has traded in reheated clichés, photogenic unknowns and choreography designed to be clipped, shared and forgotten, and no sane observer would ever have mistaken it for great cinema. Yet there was a certain grim consistency to the enterprise: instalment followed instalment with a reliable, workmanlike competence, each one delivering precisely what its audience desired and no more. That predictability made the franchise genuinely recommendable—if not to discerning critics, then certainly to devotees of the dance-film genre and to undemanding viewers seeking ninety painless minutes of rhythmic spectacle. The law of averages, however, dictates that within any long-running series some entries must sink lower than others, and that dubious honour belongs squarely to the fourth instalment, Step Up Revolution, also known as Step Up 4: Miami Heat.
Directed by Scott Speer, here making his feature debut, the film follows the third chapter's tactic of transcending its own formula by relocating the plot to a fresh backdrop. This time the setting is arguably the most colourful yet: sun-drenched, pastel-hued Miami, where the protagonist Sean Asa (Ryan Guzman) leads a collective of street dancers and performance artists who stage elaborate, spectacular, guerilla-style routines in public spaces as flash mobs. The group, calling itself simply "the Mob", watches its stunts go viral on YouTube and dreams of a hefty cash prize. Complication arrives in the shape of Emily Anderson (Kathryn McCormick), an aspiring ballerina with whom Sean becomes smitten and who ultimately joins the crew. Matters sour further when Emily's father proves to be William "Bill" Anderson (Peter Gallagher), a real-estate tycoon whose redevelopment scheme threatens to displace many of the Mob's friends. They sour yet further when Eddy (Misha Gabriel), Sean's best friend—newly fired from his waiting job by the very same Bill Anderson—discovers Emily's true identity and nurses a grudge that threatens to wreck the crew's plans altogether.
Amanda Brody's screenplay is featherlight and formulaic, yet, interestingly, it gestures towards socioeconomic commentary a shade more explicitly than its three predecessors. Once again the villain is a rapacious capitalist intent on wrecking the lives of the poor, and the title itself implies protagonists locked in class struggle against an oppressive system. Some critics, Roger Ebert among them, even read the film as a cinematic echo of the Occupy Wall Street movement. For all that contextual ambition, however, the film remains resolutely shallow. Its climactic fairy-tale resolution—in which everything conveniently falls the protagonists' way and even old Bill Anderson sees the error of his ways and agrees to preserve the neighbourhood—cheapens whatever message the script had been groping towards, reducing genuine social grievance to a plot device resolved by sentiment.
Technically, the picture is superb. Shot in 3D while the technique still retained its fleeting vogue, it benefits enormously from J. Michael Muro's glossy cinematography, from the postcard perfection of the Miami locations, and from several dance numbers that are genuinely well designed and astonishingly performed. These set pieces represent the franchise at its most persuasive: kinetic, exuberant, and briefly capable of making one forget the narrative scaffolding creaking beneath them.
Sadly, the leading performers cannot sustain the illusion. Cast principally for their looks—Guzman, a former model—or for their dance ability—McCormick, a So You Think You Can Dance alumnus—they lack the acting facility to invest their characters with anything resembling psychological depth, and this deficiency is glaringly apparent despite a script that strains to conceal it behind generic dialogue. Where Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan at least possessed a chemistry that lent their pairing an unexpected authenticity, and where Adam Sevani's Moose once threatened to steal every scene he graced, the new romantic pairing here proceeds through its motions with the spontaneity of a rehearsed routine. The finale, in which Sevani makes a small cameo reprising Moose, the series' most popular character, only underlines the unfavourable comparisons with what came before—a bittersweet reminder of the charm this instalment so conspicuously lacks.
The commercial arithmetic tells its own story. The film performed respectably enough with its target demographic, and it did little to halt the franchise's onward march towards ever-greater spectacle over substance, but the critical consensus was appropriately dismissive. It is, in the end, a film that knows its audience and serves them exactly what they expect—no more, and, crucially, rather less than its predecessors managed to supply. The dancing impresses, the scenery dazzles, and the 3D supplies its modest novelty, yet the whole affair feels like a lateral step at best: another reheated serving of identical ingredients, garnished this time with palm trees and a fleeting pretence of political conscience.
For the genre aficionado, there is enough athletic dazzle to justify the ticket. For everyone else, Step Up Revolution stands as the series' low-water mark, a reminder that consistency, however welcome, is not the same thing as quality.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
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