Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The very first Step Up movie is the only movie in the Step Up franchise with an A-List actor anywhere in sight. Channing Tatum starred in the film during his initial breakthrough year of 2006, when he played the love interest in the Amanda Bynes gender-bending Shakespeare adaptation She’s the Man and won critical praise for his supporting work in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints; by the time the year was over, he was already too big for the dance franchise that launched him. (He also managed to get a wife out of the deal, as he married his co-star Jenna Dewan.) And while Step Up — which celebrates its 10th anniversary today, if you can believe it — is a fun, sexy movie with some great dancing and the chance to see a major Hollywood star come into being right before your eyes, its most important legacy remains the fact that it birthed the other four movies, each one a superior feat of big-screen dancing.
Tatum shows up at the very beginning of Step Up 2 The Streets in order to pass the franchise off to Briana Evigan, and he’s treated like Harrison Ford in The Force Awakens. This was in 2008! Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street were still FOUR years away. But that treatment was correct: Channing Tatum was a way bigger star than anybody else in the Step Up series had been or would ever be (sorry, Ryan Guzman; you’re moving in the right direction!). And where they were going, the Step Up franchise didn’t need stars.
For Step Up 2 the Streets, the aforementioned Evigan was paired with Robert Hoffman. Who? Exactly. No disrespect meant to Hoffman, who is a handsome dude and a very good dancer. And more importantly, in the Step Up universe that was already being created, leading players were about to become progressively less important. The Streets was a crucial evolution for the franchise, but it definitely wasn’t all the way there yet. The first film was clearly going for a Save the Last Dance-style romance within the milieu of a dance academy, and the sequel was fairly self-conscious in replicating that dynamic, this time with the girl from the wrong side of the tracks and the guy being the rich (though so rebellious!) prep-schooler. Of course, nobody cared about the romance this time. Instead, the most important development was the introduction of the character who would become the beating, sliding, popping heart of the Step Up franchise. Obviously, I’m talking about Moose.
More than any other character, Moose (and the massive popularity of Adam Sevani in the series) signaled a sea change in the priorities of the series. Well, that and the massive dance extravaganza that closes the movie, a spectacle that would have to get progressively bigger and more outlandish as the series went on.
By the time Step Up 3D happened — and please note Step Up was already beginning to mark the time by grasping onto 3D in the immediate aftermath of Avatar — the leads could not have been less important (for the record, they were played by Ambercrombie model Rick Malambri and Australian Sharni Vinson, who was actually really good a few years later in the horror flick You’re Next). Step Up 3D was all about two things: the sweet romance between Moose and Camille (the girl from those Missy Elliott videos!), which manages to simmer as a subplot throughout, highlighted by one particularly lovely Fred Astaire homage …
… and the water dance.
And building on the foundation from Step Up 2 the Streets, the third film makes it perfectly clear: this is a film series about dance crews. Romances may be for the posters, but the real love story here is all about the crew as surrogate family. As both the Fred Astaire and the water dance showed, Step Up was getting a lot more formally daring in their dance sequences, even as their human storylines got duller.
Step Up Revolution was either brilliant or a disaster, depending on who you asked. The decision to wrap the story around protest “trends” like Occupy Wall Street might have been a fatally tasteless decision. But you underestimate the charm reserves of the Step Up sequels at your peril. Instead, Step Up Revolution (called Step Up: Miami Heat in other markets; I guess they figured Americans were too busy hating Lebron to see a movie about his team) played like a tricked-up version of Footloose, with the neighborhood kids forbidden to protest-dance by Peter Gallagher as a wealthy land developer. It was here that the Step Up franchise began to finally take steps to replace Channing Tatum, with Ryan Guzman playing the street tough opposite Kathryn McMormick as a refined contemporary dancer. Guzman didn’t have a prayer of filling Tatum’s shoes, but he does admirable work opposite McCormick (who is a brilliant dancer but a decidedly amateur actress) and was rightly asked back for the 5th film. Once again, Revolution surpassed its own standards when it came to the dance numbers, incorporating contemporary and ballet styles into the usual street-crew dancing. By this point, the Step Up series was a kissing cousin to FOX’s So You Think You Can Dance (McCormick was a runner-up on the show’s 6th season), and the influence that each project had on the other was mutually beneficial.
I’m going to go ahead and say that Step Up All In was the first film in the franchise to qualify as a disappointment. The set pieces just weren’t there. They didn’t take advantage of the Las Vegas setting nearly as effectively as the fourth movie did in Miami. It was still a reliable crowd pleaser, but despite hopping on the get-the-band-back-together trend popularized by the Fast and Furious franchise (Guzman, Evigan, and Sevani were the central trio, making for an all-star team of Step Ups past), the film never really hit that next gear. That stagnation was reflected in the box-office performance (despite their increase in quality over time, the Step Up sequels each made less money than their predecessor, but All In fell off Revolution‘s domestic total by more than 50%) and the fact that 2016 was the first even-numbered year in a decade not to feature a new Step Up movie. There is talk of a TV series on YouTube Red, but it won’t be the same.
Still, it’s quite a legacy. A franchise that started out as a romantic drama against a backdrop of dancing became a franchise about the romance of dance crews with occasional romances in the backdrop. Much like it’s unlikely franchise doppelganger Fast and Furious, the Step Up movies are really about a rag-tag band of dancers who trace their lineage all the way back to Channing Tatum in 2006, who thought he was falling in love but was really starting a family.
Where to stream Step Up 2 the Streets
