STEP UP (3D)

At last: cinema. Its only essential genre, whose crux is the tug between shot and montage, the gaze and the blink. Pure decadence to make Luke, the leader of the House of Pirates dance crew, their videographer as well. “You’re a filmmaker,” gushes his anima, when he shows her the rough cut of his labor of love. Yeah, but their abdomens hail from the beginning of time, he python, she anaconda—if Eat Pray Love is a numb glimpse through a sealed airplane window this is a legit jungle fuck. The cast more matter-of-factly gay, brown, and global than anyone else has half-approached, the LEDs attached to their chests for the climax’s Busby Berkeley take the peace-drunk counterpart to The Expendables’ grim laser rifle-sights. The kids are all right.

To step up. When the Argentine breakdancing twins find the Zoltar machine from Big in the Coney Island practice space, they ask him if they will in fact win the World Jam dance-off’s $100,000 purse and thereby rescue their home from a foreclosure instigated by the rival House of Samurai. But Zoltar just spits out gibberish, and they laugh it off—it’s a goof on fate, whose services they don’t require—they’re gonna sweat and krump, pop and lock their way to glory, they’re B.F.A.B. (born from a boombox), nomads as who wouldn’t be always sort of waiting for the other Nike to drop renting that size Williamsburg loft? It boasts sneaker vault, boombox wall, graffiti studio, and communal eating space—is anything more fun than a crew?

That the kid from the last one is now at NYU, and winds up double-majoring in dance and engineering, is telling. Because the moves are spinning legs and moonwalk and robot, even robot zombie, because the LEDs are not just on but of their suits. All is accomplished—the Deleuzian cyborg come, no big deal, to pass. No wonder I weep like a child when the kid and the girl suddenly break into a lyrical little Gene Kelly routine on a Greenwich Village street—the perfect immanence one foolishly fails to see coming. “Oh Luke, that film academy sounds amazing.” Let him in. I’m glad someone out there, tonight, is awake.