The upcoming “Saw 3D” looked like the scariest tri-dimensional offering at the movies this year.
Until now.
The third and weakest entry in the Disney dance saga, “Step Up 3D” is strictly 1D. Tired choreography and moldy hip-hop gestures accompany insipid characters, straight-line plotting and a touching but inept effort to make this city look like Sodom and/or Gomorrah and/or the actual New York of 1977.
This time, two NYU freshmen, a boy and a girl who have been friends since childhood, are separated when he is recruited by an underground hippity-hoppity dance gang called the Pirates. They train in a massive junkyard-furnished industrial space called “the Vault.”
The boy freshman is called Moose (Adam G. Sevani). For half the movie, I thought his name was Mouse: He looks like a stretched-out cross between Arnold Horshack and Chico Marx. Yet he’s the main character, possibly because his recruiter, Pirates chief Luke, is played by a walking catalog model named Rick Malambri. Malambri possesses one expression — of mildly scuffed vapidity.
The girls fare slightly better: The frosh Camille (Alyson Stoner) has a disarming smile that perks up the only snappy scene, in which she and Moose are inspired to scamper through an improvised Fred-and-Ginger routine on the street. It ends with the only funny line in the movie. “You can never give it up — you were born to dance!” Camille tells Moose. A passing little girl begs to differ: “Give it up: You suck!”
Love that kid. Wish she’d been given a crack at cleaning up the script, which actually contains the line, “I dance to express how I feel inside, whether it’s anger, happiness, loneliness . . .” How about lameness?
Cam and Moose’s big conflict is that he skips a Halloween party where the two of them planned to dress up like the sisters Olsen. He doesn’t tell her he’s blowing her off for his dance practice sessions.
Luke has bigger problems with his dance partner (a harmless Sharni Vinson, whose Debra Winger rasp provides the roughest edges in the movie). They do share a romantic moment or two, such as a bizarre first-kiss scene in which they blow bubbles in their Icees using subway ventilation-shaft exhaust.
The Pirates hope to win the big dance contest because the prize money could stave off foreclosure on their studio. This plot point could be more convincing, considering the enemy crew offers to buy the space for the Pirates in exchange for guaranteed victory.
Let’s see — win a meaningless dance contest or take title to a huge West Street loft? I guess the screenwriters were right when they came up with the declaration, “The most important decisions in life are never easy.”