Our hero is DJ (Columbus Short), an extremely talented dancer in the urban street style who leaves Los Angeles after a tragedy to attend college in Atlanta. Working part-time for his uncle Nate (Harry J. Lennix) as a campus groundskeeper, DJ just wants to forget about dancing and focus on his studies. Well, OK, and also on wooing April (Meagan Good), a beautiful fellow student who catches his eye as soon as he arrives.īut as fate and contrived screenplays would have it, April is the girlfriend of a jerk named Grant (Darrin Henson), and Grant is part of the Mu Gamma Xi fraternity, which has taken the national stepping championship for the last several years. (Stepping, if you’re not aware - and I confess complete ignorance on the subject until seeing “Stomp the Yard” - is an African-American style of energetic dancing that looks to these untrained eyes like a combination of tap dancing, drill team, and popping.) DJ has already run afoul of Grant’s crew for other reasons, and now he’s after Grant’s woman, too. The Mu Gamma Xis become aware of DJ’s dancing prowess after he is forced to prove himself at a local club one night, and they try to recruit him. But he is resistant, joining their chief rivals, Theta Nu Theta (TNT!), instead, after realizing that a fraternity can be so much more than just keg parties and dance competitions. It can also be a chance to win the girl, show up those snooty Mu Gamma Xis, and help TNT succeed by introducing street moves into the team’s stepping routine.Įvery single element of Robert Adetuyi’s screenplay (a reworking of a previous draft by Gregory Ramon Anderson) is a cliche, and it goes off on a few useless tangents. It’s fine that April’s dad would prefer she date the well-connected law student Grant over the wrong-side-of-the-tracks DJ, but does her dad need to have a decades-old grudge against Uncle Nate, too? And why shoehorn a trumped-up ethics charge against DJ into the story? Sure, it gets him suspended. But no one really thinks he’s going to stay suspended and miss the climactic national championship dance-off, do they? Give us a little credit here.
There’s also the matter of one of Grant’s goons secretly filming DJ in rehearsal in order to steal his moves - and the fact that the scheme is never mentioned again. Maybe we’re supposed to notice DJ’s moves appearing in Grant’s routine later on and I’m just not observant enough.
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