If nothing else is true about these films, they are a genuine showcase for people who wouldn't otherwise be in the Hollywood spotlight. Chu (who also helmed the second film), some of these set-pieces are impressive in their own right. It's not just the fact that the plot is weaker than the previous offerings, it's that the director seems so completely disinterested in the story and focusses all his attention on the individual set-pieces.
THE STEP UP MOVIES SERIES
What began in Step Up 2: The Streets has become magnified here, to the point where it is much less a film as a series of sub-MTV music videos. In my review of the original Step Up, I spoke about how its sequels "increasingly sacrificed narrative for the sake of set-pieces". In the case of Step Up 3, released just one year after James Cameron's bloated epic, even the most eye-popping 3D can't disguise the fact that its plot is a complete and utter mess.
TV is undercutting the exclusivity of cinema in 3D and in other areas, and audiences increasingly recognise that 'an extra dimension' does not guarantee a special experience. The higher ticket prices and often dodgy glasses were excused on the grounds that home entertainment systems could not compete with seeing things come out of the screen in the company of several hundred people.įive years on from the release of Avatar, we've started to see many aspects of this argument come under fire. 3D films, it was claimed, would save cinema because they offered audiences something that they could not experience in the comfort of their own homes. When the current 3D wave was getting underway, many commentators were arguing for 3D films as a 'unique cinematic experience'.