Step Up 2: The Streets

Critics seem to agree that it's best simply to ignore the plot of Step Up 2 the Streets and sit back and enjoy the music and dancing. Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune observes, "It's just as cornball as Step Up (2006), but it's more fun -- more of a full-on dance musical, its plot a mere slip of a thing designed to whisk you to the next excuse for another choreographic and ab-centric display." Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News notes that at one point in the film, a character remarks, "This ain't High School Musical." Says Weitzman, "But the truth is, it's not that far off, either. It may be set in gritty, graffiti-covered Baltimore, but it's also unabashedly earnest, completely predictable and packed with enough high-voltage dance scenes to make any audience applaud." Well, not any audience. Susan Walker writes in the Toronto Star that the movie "reeks of artificiality and phony emotion. Even the dancing looks as if it was (sic) computer-generated." Claudia Puig in USA Today describes it as "one long, clichéd exercise in predictability with a couple of vibrant dance sequences and some unintentionally hilarious bad acting."