Like Curtis Hanson's 8 Mile, actually, Step Up 2 the Streets assays urban tension and class/race conflict without needlessly getting into gunplay and all the distasteful and/or stereotypically overwrought chest-thumping that often stems from that. One of the movie's great successes is the sense of scale apportioned its conflicts.
So when her old friends abandon her, she joins forces with Chase and a new posse of classmate outcasts and unconventional types to form a crew to compete in Baltimore's big underground dance battle, The Streets. Andie is caught up between two worlds, and the different rules and expectations that go with each. Her unique talent, as well as her attractiveness, catches the attention of the school's hottest dancer and reigning big man on campus, Chase (Robert Hoffman), whose older brother Blake (Will Kemp), a legendary ballet performer in his own right, has returned to lead the school and oversee its artistic re-shaping. Given the opportunity of an audition at the prestigious but vey proper Maryland School of the Arts, the street-wise Andie improbably wins a spot. Similarly devoted opening weekend turnout and enthusiastic word-of-mouth should drive solid and sustained eight-figure theatrical receipts, and Step Up 2 the Streets should dance off with considerable ancillary market.and international profits as well, given the repeat-play value that results as a function of the universality of its story and the quality of its execution.ĭelivering a gender inversion of the same loose, wrong-side-of-the-tracks narrative of the first film, the story centers on rebellious, teenage street dancer Andie (Briana Evigan), a Baltimore-bred orphan on the brink of being sent by her deceased mother's friend to live with her aunt in Texas - a fate akin to permanent exile. The more aggressively urbanized You Got Served danced its way to $40 million Stateside in 2004, while Stomp the Yard opened to $21 million en route to a $61 million domestic gross in last year's first quarter.
#Step up 2 the streets final dance movie#
The movie was just the latest underdog hit in a consistently viable new subgenre 2001's Save the Last Dance kickstarted the nascent trend, catching fire with a $23 million domestic opening en route to over $130 million in cumulative receipts. In August of 2006, Step Up, the $12 million directorial debut of choreographer Anne Fletcher, used a deft, direct-appeal marketing campaign that included a contest which let users submit their own dance videos to ring up a surprising $20.6 opening weekend, part of a $114 million worldwide gross that included just under $49 million in international receipts. A fresh slate of young performers, combined with energetically staged and photographed sequences that convey the cathartic joy of dance, easily outweigh some of the more predictable rhythms of formulaic storytelling in Step Up 2 the Streets, a fun, flirty and engaging teen drama and stand-alone sequel that serves as the latest entry in a line of pan-ethnic dance films pitched chiefly at teens and big-city twentysomethings.