‘Step Up’ offers flash mob fun

By ROGER MOORE
McClatchy News Service

Step Up Revolution taps into the dance “flash mob” phenomenon and moves to Miami to give us the sunniest and most entertaining of these kids-gotta-dance musicals.

The flash mobs — dancing on the roofs, hoods and trunks of low-rider vintage cars in Miami traffic, disrupting museum openings and a developer’s planning meetings — are brilliantly choreographed, well-shot and sharply edited treats

Well, except for one unfortunately timed stunt involving a darkened room, smoke bombs and menacing dancers charging in wearing gas masks. And another, with dancers imitating machine guns strafing a crowd. Sad that the news intrudes, inadvertently, on this late-summer cotton-candy confection.

Sean (Ryan Guzman) is the heart and soul of The Mob, a Miami dance crew that has its own DJ (Cleopatra Coleman), hacker-planner (Misha Hamilton), dancer/special effects guy (Stephen Boss) and street artist (Michael Langebeck) who “tags” each of their events with “The Mob.” That’s not to mention the parkour “stunt” specialists and the videographer who hides his camera in the darnedest places whenever they go out on “a mission.”

Stopping traffic and choreographing the jolly, bouncing low-riders they roll up in has got to be preserved and uploaded to YouTube. They want to attract so many YouTube hits that they win a contest and collect some cash. Because these dancers are from the one underdeveloped corner of Miami riverfront left — and the wrong side of the tracks.