PLOT: An L.A. ghetto teen gets out of jail and, thanks to his Georgia family's intervention, goes to college in Atlanta. That's where he learns about the step-dance tradition and how to find his place in the world.
As an insight into a rich American cultural tradition, Stomp The Yard has promise. As a Hollywood movie, however, it is a clumsy, cliche-ridden disappointment.
The tradition is stepping, a modern version of the African gumboot dance that is used by fraternities at African-American colleges. Stepping is a precision team sport, an entertainment and an exacting discipline that allows the seniors at frat houses to teach new members how to sublimate the individual ego for the greater good.
Especially with the hip-hop moves adopted here, stepping also lends itself to the movies. It can be as spectacular as watching Bill (Bojangles) Robinson tapping, Fred Astaire gliding, the Nicholas Brothers defying gravity or Gene Kelly stomping the floor. Dance and cinema grew up together.
But Sylvain White's movie -- which chronicles how an outcast Los Angeles ghetto teen ends up on a step team at a fictional, upscale Atlanta institution called Truth University -- bungles the job. That's the ugly truth.
White does not ruin the dance or step sequences themselves. The Franco-American White, who was born and raised in Paris, has a background in American advertising and music videos. So his action scenes -- from the innercity hip-hop battle in L.A. to the military-like step contests in Atlanta -- are slick, glossy, overproduced affairs.
By the time the final step contest is held at an arena, the enterprise looks like the finale of a Broadway musical, with some of the most chiselled, lean, limber and talented African-American dancers in all of America.
The problem, then, is everything in between the production numbers. In most movies, that is called plot and character development. In Stomp The Yard, it is a rip-off of a bunch of beat-up, banal, and intellectually empty cliches.
Each story point -- from the thug murder that follows the L.A. dance battle to the enrichment of the ghetto kid's life in Atlanta through education, discipline and an unlikely romance -- is painfully obvious long before it happens. There are no surprises, no complexities.
The script is by Robert Adetuyi, who reworked an earlier original screenplay by Gregory Anderson. White's work includes I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. Clearly, Stomp The Yard needed stronger hands to wrestle this class-war story into something significant.
As it stands, or stomps, the movie is more about attitude than accomplishment. Most of the young men depicted are surly and confrontational, including our so-called hero (Columbus Short). His romantic obsession (Meagan Good) is played for sex appeal. His primary adversary (Darrin Dewitt Henson) is played as arrogant and selfish.
None of them shows even a glimmer of good sportsmanship, either when winning or losing. Instead, the movie smacks of tribal warfare. Ultimately, Stomp The Yard is about stomping your opponent, crushing his ego. That is just as ugly as the stepping is beautiful.
BOTTOM LINE: This romantic drama about the step tradition could find an audience for the dance moves, but it won't be because it's a good movie.
(This film is rated PG)
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