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Stomp The Yard

2007, Movie, PG-13, 114 mins

Stomp The Yard: Review

STOMP THE YARD
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Far too long for a movie so unabashedly formulaic, Sylvain White's drama about a kid from L.A. who discovers the world of "stepping" at an Atlanta university uses a propulsive soundtrack and flashy dance sequences to draw attention away from wooden acting and a cliched plot. After winning the pot at an underground L.A. club where street-dancing teams compete against one another for cash, Darnell "D.J." Williams (actor-choreographer Columbus Short), his brother Duron (Chris Brown) and their crew are jumped by the losing team. When the dust settles, Duron lies dying in D.J.'s arms from a gunshot wound. Stepping into his brother's college-bound shoes, a grieving and conscience-stricken D.J. heads to Atlanta's Truth University, the traditionally black institution that D.J.'s aunt (Valarie Pettiford) attended and where his uncle (Harry Lennix) now oversees the physical plant. Social life at class-conscious Truth largely revolves around the university's elite fraternities and sororities. A scholarship student, D.J. has no interest in joining a frat, until he catches word of a "stepping" face-off, in which one fraternity challenges another in a competitive demonstration of tightly choreographed, highly stylized dancing. Part line dance, part military drill, part pantomime, stepping layers percussive clapping, slapping and shouting on a traditional melange of movement that D.J. recognizes as a close relative to the newer, more street-inflected combination of krunking, clowning and B-boying that he and Duron mastered on the streets of L.A. D.J. uses his own skills at a local club to school Grant (Darrin Henson), the arrogant star stepper who's dating April (Meagan Good), the upper-class coed whom D.J. also likes. Then he's wooed by two competing fraternities: the Mu Gamma Xis, current national step champions, and the Theta Nu Thetas, the perennial also-rans who hope to one day steal the Mu's crown. D.J., however, still hasn't learned how to be a team player — something Duron accused him of shortly before he died — and he isn't ready to replace the brotherhood he so recently lost with this new kind of fraternity. Anyone who's seen the far superior DRUMLINE — or any sports movie at all, for that matter — will experience a nagging sense of deja vu upon viewing this one. Aside from mentioning that stepping has long been a tradition in African-American Greek life (which White celebrates with a heavy hand at every turn), the film is surprisingly unenlightening on the subject. If you come to the film without knowing a thing about stepping, you'll pretty much leave the same way. Nor will you be very impressed. Unlike Dave LaChapelle's krunk documentary RIZE (2006), which deliberately avoided speeding up or slowing down dance sequences in order to give an accurate depiction of his dancers' skills, White gussies up his footage with too much optical trickery to separate the talent from the special effects. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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