Step Up Three Full Movie
The plan was not to write about how good Step Up is 10 years later, honestly, because the plan was to write about the idea that Step Up was part of an early-aughts wave of urban dance movies, wherein “urban” was a euphemism for “skimming off the surface of black culture to give edge to a movie about white people”. The early 2000s were a weird time in pop culture, when we celebrated a lot of trashy stuff that we would rip apart today: Justin Timberlake’s cornrow/bandana headband combo, the not-so latent homophobia in Superbad, the sexism percolating throughout Knocked Up.
But Step Up does not belong in that riff. Because, upon very close inspection on the occasion of this aluminum anniversary, Step Up is actually great. Really: it is so much better than it has any right to be. Think of all the dance movies that tried and failed, hard, where Step Up succeeded: Step Up is miles better than Honey, You Got Served, even the so-bad-it’s-lowkey-amazing Center Stage.
The evolution of Channing Tatum: from 'dull beefcake dude' to XXL movie star
Maybe you haven’t given Step Up much thought in the intervening decade, or maybe your memory of the original has been marred by the aggressively terrible five sequels. Perhaps you are thinking, not incorrectly, that the likelihood of this teen dance movie from 2006, the year that brought you Snakes on a Plane, being anything less than cringeworthy now is very low.
It was on the set of Step Up that Jenna Dewan, who plays Nora – a dance student at a prestigious arts school who is conveniently in need of a new rehearsal partner for the senior showcase, which is the only way she can ever get a job or a future in dance – met her now real-life husband, Channing Tatum, whose Tyler is a ne’er-do-well foster kid who shows his disdain for the establishment through the usual means – backwards hat, baggy clothes, lousy posture – who breaks, enters, and trashes Nora’s school one night. He winds up owing 200 hours of community service to this fine institution but quickly ditches his assigned janitorial duties to fill in for whatever plot device of a person Nora was supposed to be dancing with before.
So Step Up’s magnetism is meta: the movie is a meet-cute inside a meet-cute. Not only is it where Jenna met Channing – nothing like watching actors fall in love in the movies when you just know they’re falling in love behind the scenes – but also, and more crucially, it’s where we met Channing.
Another notable quality that hopefully one day will be so common as to no longer be notable: the cast is flush with black actors, all of whom play three-dimensional characters with independent goals, interests and lives outside their relationships with the two white leads. They don’t solely exist to make the movie “edgier” or to help other people realize their professional or personal desires. It honestly makes you wonder why were we hyping the Obama presidency when two full years before his first presidential win Step Up was there to be the change.
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Step Up All In review – street dance takes a tumble
Channing was a one-man charm offensive. Before the meme would make this desire something easy to articulate, he was a man who could do both: the bro who appreciated ballet. Even though Channing starred in the severely underrated Amanda Bynes movie She’s the Man a mere five months earlier, Step Up was where most audiences saw Channing for the first time. And this fruitful love story, between Channing and millions of people who just want to stare at him for two hours while he does whatever he’s doing, has continued uninterrupted for 10 beautiful years.
Step Up is not particularly quotable; Center Stage wins that dance battle. And it’s not making a statement in the style of Save the Last Dance, which came out five years earlier. But without it, who knows when – if ever! – Channing Tatum and the masses would have found our way to each other. Who wants to live in the dystopic alternate reality of America where we never got a single Magic Mike movie? Not this reporter.