For as unoriginal as it is, there's something pleasantly wholesome about "Stomp the Yard." The movie thinks it's better than
it is, but that misapprehension comes across as enthusiasm, not pretension. It's a movie about people dancing. They dance a lot, and they dance well. It can almost get by on that alone. 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. But 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.
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