On a mission to watch every Channing Tatum movie for no other reason than its something to do, I got sidetracked upon reaching the iconic dance film Step Up (2006). After watching it once and telling myself it was mediocre at best, I proceeded to watch it three more times (just to make sure). Suddenly, watching every Channing Tatum movie became watching every Step Up movie – a task I naively assumed would take me a single night. I was wrong – there are five Step Up movies, a Chinese spin-off, and three seasons of a TV show. Since this is way too much Step Up for the average college student to consume, I’ve taken the time to rank them for you so you know which ones are truly worth spending your precious free hours on.
6. Step Up: Year of the Dance (2019)
There are only a few movies I’ve seen that I’d consider truly unwatchable, the number one offender being the 43-minute-long Nickelodeon movie Rufus in which a dog transforms into a human boy. Step Up: Year of Dance managed to reach Rufus levels bad and had the further audacity of being a full-length feature film. The plot of this movie is held together by macaroni noodles and some string – sequentially they barely make sense and all together it’s lackluster. And to top it all off, the volume of the music in each scene is turned down so low that you can hear the awkward shoe squeaking and clothes shuffling as they attempt to pop and lock.
5. Step Up 3D (2015)
I would first like to state that this was not watched in 3D so maybe I’m missing out on some genre-changing 3D mechanics, but as it stands this movie was trash. While all Step Up movies have plain-looking white leads, the main character, Luke, has such a scarily generic face that I hope he followed up this movie by doing a succession of Christian Christmas films where he belongs. This movie is saved only by the character Moose who manages to act and dance better than anyone else on the screen. That being said, you’d get a better experience watching a YouTube compilation of Moose’s dance scenes than watching the actual film itself.
4. Step Up: All In (2014)
This movie is kind of the Sing 2 of the series, and while I can’t elaborate on that just know in your heart that it’s true. The all-stars from the previous movies (aka everyone they could convince to come back) return to do a dance competition show and learn the power of family along the way or something. What’s truly revolutionary for this movie however, is that Step Up finally answered the question I’d been asking since the first film, what would happen if they made two poor people fall in love? Turns out, nothing interesting.
3. Step Up: Revolution (2012)
This film is a 2012 period piece – the flash mobs, the desire to be YouTube famous, the main character singing “Whip My Hair” in the first 20 minutes. And while, in classic Step Up fashion, the main rich girl has to come tell the poor people to protest like this was an idea they couldn’t have come up with on their own, the actual protest dances are so good I don’t even care.
2. Step Up (2006)
While I may have started this film on a mission to complete the Channing Tatum discography, by the end I had entered a new world. A world that seriously should not have been about Channing Tatum’s character when his far more interesting friend was right there but c’est la vie.
1. Step Up: The Streets (2008)
Is this movie good on an objective level? No, absolutely not. Is it good on my incredibly biased and subjective scale? Yeah, it’s pretty great. This movie exemplifies some of my biggest issues with the Step Up franchise, and yet it’s also the most fun out of all of them. The leads have actual chemistry, the dances are fantastic, Moose is there, and the soundtrack is iconic. I’ve seen this movie six times in the past year and while I complain through the entire thing, like the humble gecko stumbling upon a pool of water in the desert, I keep coming back for more.
(If you are wondering whatever happened to that TV show I mentioned at the beginning, watching Year of the Dance broke my spirit and I could no longer carry on. There is a limit to bad dance films one can take, 3 seasons is Geneva-Convention-breaking levels of torture.)