The late-summer 2006 sleeper Step Up, about a troubled young man from the wrong side of the tracks who finds redemption on the dance floor with his high-stepping moves and a girl who cares for him, was such a hit that it has been reworked by the Disney Studios into Step Up 2: The Streets.

Same city — Baltimore.

Same basic plot.

Same exhaustingly high-stepping dance routines.

But this time the lead character is a troubled young woman who must find herself with the help of complex dance gyrations and a young man who cares for her. If she doesn’t get her grades up and earn a spot to study at the Maryland School of the Arts (MSA), the orphaned Andie (Briana Evigan) will be shipped off to live with an aunt in Texas.

Although the underpinnings of the story are similar, this time the plot seems more pedestrian as it travels a straight line from Point A to Point B, just as one would expect. It doesn’t help that Evigan, who looks to be about seven years beyond high school and older than every other young actor in the cast, gives a straightforward but lackluster performance. She creates little sympathy for Andie and there’s not a lot of chemistry between her and Robert Hoffman, who plays Chase Collins, the “most popular kid” in school. Son of a gun, Chase is also the wayward brother of Blake (Will Kemp), the demandingly straight-arrow director of the MSA

Blake wants his students to stick strictly to the classics, which Chase finds boring. Blake thinks the step dance moves — a combination of choreographed aerobics and gymnastics with a lot of arm waving and body gyrations and even head spinning which are outgrowths of breakdancing from the ’70s — are not dancing. He’s planning a big soiree at which he hopes his students will show classical dance movements to the movers and shakers he’s counting on to fund his new home for the MSA.

But Chase and Andie and their “crew” sneak into the MSA in off hours to secretly rehearse their gyrations which they hope will win them the top spot in Baltimore’s underground dance battle, called The Streets. They, of course, are the underdogs.

So we have two familiar movie themes running concurrently in Step Up 2: The Streets, which is almost too much for such a fragile script. The first theme is that overused Hollywood staple, the Misfit Underdog Movie. The second is The Stuck-Up Snobs (represented by Blake) Versus The Unpretentious People Like Us (represented by Andie and Chase) Movie. In either storyline, there’s no question of exactly where Step Up 2 is headed.

The only real surprise comes during the first dance contest. Chase and Andie and their crew have practiced and practiced and practiced their little toes off and have earlier shown us some spectacular moves. But when they turn up on the dance floor to strut their stuff in front of hundreds of others, including a rival crew, they are terrible. Huh?

On its way to a cornball ending, Step Up 2 does have some eye-popping dance movements, choreographed by Jamal Sims, who is back from the first film, but now joined by Hi-Hat and Dave Scott. The opening sequence, with Andie and her friends terrorizing subway train passengers by donning scary masks and dancing all over the car, is a knockout. So is a dance number that makes extensive use of in-floor trampolines. The final dance challenge, played outdoors in a downpour lit only by car headlights is a stunner.

Too bad the filmmakers didn’t pay as much attention to the details of the plot as they do to the herky-jerky dance movements.

**Step Up 2: The Streets

Starring: Briana Evigan, Robert Hoffman, Adam G. Sevani, Will Kemp.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com