Given my long and well-established love for street dancing, urban attitude, popping, locking and dissing, I felt I had no choice but to see ?Step Up 2: The Streets? on opening weekend. It was a ghetto-fabulous, rollercoaster adventure without the grills but with extra dissing.

?Step Up 2: The Streets? takes place in the same city as the first movie, again focusing on the Maryland School of Arts. This prestigious school only tucks itself away in the inner city to appear edgy and avant-garde.

It is here that the film?s dramatic conflict goes down with a level of intensity unheard of in this genre ? which can only be described as some sort of amalgamation of hip-hop, dance, dramedy and romance ? until now. Before protagonist Andi (Briana Evigan, ?Bottoms Up?) joins her art school, she is part of a fly crew of dancers called the ?410.? Unable to participate in both dancing institutions at the same time, she is sadly forced to leave her troupe. Hijinks ensue when Andi tries to form a new crew to battle the 410. It all goes down in a climactic urban dance-off that seems to be a cross between MTV?s ?Wildin? Out,? ABC?s ?Dancing with the Stars? and HBO?s ?The Wire.?

The characters are seriously laughable, or maybe laughably serious. Evigan?s character is written as the typically misguided youth, while Chase and Blake Collins play out the usual sibling rivalry; Chase is all about the creative, badass dance moves while Blake is all about formality as the Maryland School for Arts director.

The script and dialogue are a 90-minute joke, but the dramatics only serve as interludes between scenes of dance battles and montages anyway. The best lines came from the superbly stereotyped Asian dancer that is somehow foreign to all American culture, save for hip-hop dancing. Perhaps the only theme of any substance is derived from the wealth-centric conflict between the urban 410 crew and Andi?s well-off art school crew, which provides cunning social commentary on reverse racism and the follies of misguided prejudices.

In all fairness, the movie does have some gnarly dance moves in it, which is really its only redeeming quality. Of course, no one goes into a dance movie sequel with any real of expectations, except to see poor dramatizations of teen angst and more epic dancing. In this regard, then, ?Step Up 2: The Streets? does everything it is supposed to do.

2 stars out of 5