Let me say upfront that I am not the target audience for Step Up. I'm over the age of 16 (by a long shot), I'm male and I don't think of Save the Last Dance as an art film. That said, however, I'd like to think I can appreciate even a teeny bopper dance flick if it's done well.

But Step Up isn't so much done well as well-done, as in overcooked. Its recipe is straightforward enough: Add two parts The Cutting Edge, two parts Dirty Dancing, one part Fame and stir briskly. The result is flavorless gristle. Being that this is the kind of movie where you know within the first 10 minutes every plot point that will follow, any subsequent entertainment value is going to come from appreciating the mechanics of how it's done. How's the chemistry of the leads? How's the dancing? Is the movie sexy? Charming? Funny? (The answers, in case you're interested: so-so / not enough of it / no / not really / inadvertently so).

Tyler Gage (Channing Tatum), a hunky car thief in inner-city Baltimore, is busted for trashing a stage inside the Maryland School of the Arts. In a creative bit of alternative sentencing, a judge orders Ty to 200 hours of janitorial service at the school, where he whittles away the time doing urban dance moves in the parking lot and subsequently catching the attention of Nora (Jenna Dewan), a well-to-do, ambitious dance student.

Nora is busy rehearsing for her super-important showcase in hopes of landing a professional dance gig that will spare her the agony of attending an Ivy League school. But d'oh! Her dance partner winds up on crutches and evidently all the other male dancers at the performing-arts school have the coordination of Don Knotts on an acid trip. It looks like lovely Nora has no recourse but to talk the school principal ("Six Feet Under's" Rachel Griffiths, obviously slumming it here) into letting her team up with Ty, the good-looking thug from the wrong side of the tracks. Don't think I'm giving anything away when I suggest that these two kids might end up falling in love, but not before the foreplay of learning valuable life lessons.

Step Up is tepid, by-the-numbers fluff that doesn't even deliver much in the way of dance until the end. By then, it's too little and too late to care.

The picture, in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, is excellent quality. Step Up has little to recommend it, but cinematographer Michael Seresin -- whose credits include Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Angel Heart and a movie Step Up owes much to, Fame -- lends the film a bit of much-needed credibility. The picture quality is vivid, detailed and full of rich colors.

The audio is crisp and free of distortion or drop-off, a solid Dolby Digital 5.1 track ensuring that every cringe-inducing line of dialogue comes through loud and clear. A French track is available in 2.0, while subtitles are available in English and Spanish.

A commentary track with director-choreographer Anne Fletcher, Tatum, Dewan and hip-hop choreographer Jamal Sims is breezy and lighthearted. The four-minute, 38-second featurette, Making the Moves, gives an overview of the film's choreography. Seven deleted scenes, all of which are unnecessary and have optional commentary by Fletcher, combine for an aggregate length of four minutes, 12 seconds.

The DVD includes a soundtrack promo and music videos for the following:
Samantha Jade - "Step Up"
Sean Paul, featuring Keyshia Cole - "(When You Gonna) Give It Up to Me"
Chris Brown - "Say Goodbye"
Ciara, featuring Chamillionaire – "Get Up"

The Ciara video is at the heart of a lengthy MySpace dance contest that accounts for most of the supplemental material. Fletcher and the stars of Step Up judged the contest, the winners of which earned a dance spot in the "Get Up" video. From beginning to end, the contest highlights and lowlights clock in a little past 31 minutes.

Other extras include bloopers (1:35), as well as sneak peeks for Invincible; Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe: Four-Disc Extended Edition; The Invisible; The Guardian; The Heart of the Game and coming to Blu-Ray.

Step Up isn't an aggressively bad movie; it's far too harmless and lightweight for that. And that's about all that can be said for it.