Dance movies have a built-in audiences, which are small but loyal. This is ultimately just another dance movie to pack the clubs for a couple weekends.

If you liked Dirty Dancing, Save The Last Dance, or Honey, then you’ll love this movie. Step Up is a cliché dance movie about Tyler, an underprivileged teenager with a passion for hip-hop dancing who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. It finally catches up to him when he is forced to pay back a vandalism debt by being a janitor at the local art school. He soon discovers that there is a way to escape the troubles of poverty using his talent of staying on beat on the dance floor. It’s a story of friendship, passion, and teenage love. In other words, a perfect date movie. I used it as a first date myself.

This movie was surprisingly good, even though it was painfully predictable. Here’s the anatomy of a run-of-the-mill dance movie:

An outcast from the other side of the tracks surprises his/her new peers by exhibiting a talent that not only impresses but gains him/her unlikely friends and the cutest boy/girl in school. Then at the end there is a big dance performance that wins some contest or accomplishes some dream that they’ve been working on the entire movie, all ending with a romantic kiss.

I just described at least seven movies that revolve around dancing or singing. If you like that sort of thing, you need to buy this movie.