Get it? The number 2 works like the word "to" ... clever huh?

A great deal of dancing takes place in Step Up 2 the Streets, and for that I’ll admit I’m ill equipped to review it in a way that will do its bird-brained plot justice. It’s not just me, though — movie critics are never in the target demographic on these kinds of pictures.

So who is? Pretty much anyone who will openly admit they enjoyed the original Step Up. Or people who use “dope” as an adjective, or “battle” as a verb but have never served in the military.

So, yeah, Step Up 2 the Streets is about dancing. Lots of dancing. It takes place in a world where dancing is the currency, the wallets and purses, the bank and the Federal Reserve. It is also everything else, too — prick someone’s finger and little dancing feet will spill from the wound. Dancing is mostly expression, though, which makes me question that whole First Amendment thing.

This isn’t metaphorical expression. It’s no West Side Story, where dance was a violent catharsis. It’s no Footloose, where dance was a rite of passage. Or Chicago, with its choreographed sins and gyrating thighs. Step Up is more of an exhibition of dance, a technical ecstasy of fancy footwork.

Dancers seem to defy gravity, grow third arms and fourth legs, spin up and in when gravity suggests down and out. Several times characters are seen sliding on their heads across floors; either the floors were just waxed or their domes naturally exude Astroglide. The choreography seems all over the place and is never fluid enough to be considered one constant piece of dance, but the individual moves are exhilarating. It may fail at everything that makes a movie a movie, and a dance a dance, but at least it knows how to show off.

We begin with Andie (Briana Evigan), a girl with far too many half shirts that expose her tummy. Her age is a mystery: she’s in high school (maybe) and lives at home, but then she gets into after-hour dance clubs with relative ease. Andie is with the 410 ("four-one-oh"), a crew of urban terrorists who dance in public on the subway, sometimes to the absolute horror of the elderly. Andie is given one of those cliché ultimatums from an uncaring guardian: “shape up or ship out” … to Texas. She shapes up by wowing some choreography judges with her urban-infused dance moves and gets into a performing arts school that has the potential to “unseat Juilliard.”

Of course, the snobby campus and its required homework alienate her from her friends in the 410, who are so "street" they rehearse in the sweltering sun in rusty playgrounds. They take her tardiness at dance rehearsals as personal attacks on their moral characters, or they're just possessive little bitches. After a formal inquisition and a vote using parliamentary procedure ("You out, let's bounce") Andie is kicked from the group named after Baltimore's area code. She then quickly organizes her own crew out of her school’s eccentric and misfit dancers, who must then battle on the “streets” to prove their worth.

I put streets in quotes only because the movie spends a great deal of time explaining the concept of the streets. It suggests that “the streets” is a metaphor for the real world, where true dancers go to hone and test their skills, which is why kids from the streets dislike trained students — they didn’t earn it. The movie uses the phrase so often, and in so many random situations, that I kept wondering if one of the clubs was actually called The Streets (it wasn’t). So yes, Step Up mistakes the streets as a real place when it’s actually an abstract idea that isn’t really tangible. It's like when people say that they're "in the zone" — there's no real zone.

There are other subplots, of course: a talented male dancer is involved, as well as a nerdy boy with untapped dancing skills, a classically trained ballerina who longs for attention and a bitter dance professor, who thinks hip-hop dancing is classless dreck. I like that guy.

The story is by no means original. It borrows a great deal from cheerleader movie Bring It On, now imprisoned in a straight-to-DVD-sequel hell, as well as 8 Mile, which is a million times more legit and possibly to blame for these hip-hop-based battle movies. (Do yourself a favor and please check out Rize, David LaChappelle’s documentary about hip-hop dancing. It shows the real streets and the real dancers and doesn't tie some stupid love story around them.)

Step Up’s main fault may not be its bogus plot but that it takes itself so seriously. I found myself laughing out loud at many of the developments: the subway boogie, a salsa party, a dance-off in thick sheets of rain. During one rather ridiculously choreographed sequence, panels are removed from the dance floor to reveal buried trampolines, which the dancers then bounce off of in acrobatic glee. When the trampolines were uncovered I immediately thought of Shoot'em Up, which was so bored with normal gunfights it staged one in the air in a freefall.

Hip-Hop culture deserves better than this; maybe it deserves nothing at all — no movies, TV shows, dance-offs — to preserve its authenticity. It’s been said that when the mainstream public discovers something new and interesting then it’s already dead and buried within the circles that were instrumental in its creation. If that’s true then somewhere a b-boy is weeping because of movies such as Step Up 2 the Streets.