Two Left Feet

The dance movie genre is massively oversubscribed, with films such as Step Up, You Got Served and Make It Happen being churned out with the same mechanical predictability year in year out.

How She Move doesn't depart from the clichés in countless other movies and sadly even the dance moves are lacklustre.

Raya (Rutina Wesley) is an bright teenager who leaves her private school to return home to her poor roots after her sister dies of a drug overdose and her family are left struggling with their finances. Unbeknown to her parents, she joins a local dance group when she learns of a $50,000 first prize in an upcoming competition. Along the way she has confrontations with her best friend (Tre Armstrong) and the leader of her step group (Dwain Murphy) where obvious sexual tension is building.

We've all seen this before. Impoverished teenager overcomes all odds and follows her dreams whilst cherishing the meaning of friendship and resolving family expectations. Blah blah blah. Needless to say, her group win the dance off in which she predictably faces off against her major rivals who conveniently also manage to make it to the final.

You could make a pretty good drinking game out of this movie called “Spot the cliché”, except that you'd be too drunk to stand after half an hour.

As a director you would have thought that if your plot was so thin that you can almost see through it and your characters so underdeveloped and two dimensional that they make Tom and Jerry look like high art, you'd actually focus on getting the dance part of your movie right?

But no, the lighting is so bad that it looks like it was made in a basement, the dance moves are as clunky and repetitive as to be completely unengaging and the harsh editing frequently makes it difficult to tell what's going on.

If you've got passing interest in the Side Step dance craze or a fascination with bad movies then you might want to look in on this. Other than that, there's no reason to watch this cliché ridden, formulaic nonsense.