Partway through Step Up 3D there’s a number unlike anything else in the movie. Set to a remix of Fred Astaire’s version of I Won’t Dance, blaring from an ice-cream truck’s loudspeaker, it’s the film’s most conspicuous attempt to ride Astaire’s coattails and is its only memorable dance. That’s not because of the choreography, which is ho-hum, but because for a few moments the dancing helps tell the story, taking the tentative romance of Moose (Adam G. Sevani) and Camille (Alyson Stoner) a few steps further.

The rest of the film is business as usual, which means that every 20 minutes or so it grinds to a halt for another overproduced dance-crew routine. The dancers may be skilled, but their work has no meaning in terms of the story — it’s pure spectacle, and numbingly repetitive spectacle at that. (Sometimes the outcome of a “battle” matters to the plot, but the winners are always preordained.)

For real excitement and emotion you’d be better off watching America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV.com, where there’s less corny dialogue and hokey contrivance to get in the way of the moves.

Jon M. Chu, who directed Step Up 2: The Streets, and the writers Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer have moved the story to New York from Baltimore, the setting of the first two films in the series. Camille, a character in the original Step Up, and Moose, from Step Up 2, arrive in New York for college and are swept into the film’s fairy-tale world of warring hip-hop dance crews and vast downtown lofts, a vision seemingly stitched together from Wild Style, Babes in Arms (Let’s put on a show!) and 1940s boxing movies.

The perfunctory narrative, involving the central crew’s efforts to save its sprawling studio-club-crash pad, is just an excuse for a series of dance showdowns; it functions less as a story than as a catalogue of references meant to interest a young audience: mixed martial arts, parkour, X-games, Red Hook, Chinatown, D.I.Y. filmmaking. It doesn’t demand much of the mostly anonymous cast; Sevani, who looks and sounds just the slightest bit like a young, white Michael Jackson, has the most distinctive presence among the leads, but there doesn’t appear to have been anyone around to help him shape a real character.

In fairness, a lot of the filmmakers’ attention probably went to shooting the movie in 3-D (no after-the-fact conversion here), and the effect is unusually natural-looking and unobtrusive. Dancing, with its bodies moving behind and around other bodies, is a good fit for 3-D, though especially robotic movement still looks pasted on the screen.

New Yorkers may be impressed by the scenes in which Washington Square Park, the East River bridges and the Grand Central Terminal concourse serve as backdrops — it really does feel just the tiniest bit as if you were there.

Step Up 3D is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has the occasional naughty word.

Mike Hale (New York Times News Service)

Also releasing this week

EMOTIONAL ATYACHAR (THE FILM)

A road thriller and dark comedy, Emotional Atyachar chronicles the adventures of four sets of travellers on a single night. While each is on a separate journey, they are bound together by their love for money. Emotional Atyachar stars Mohit Ahlawat, Kalki Koechlin and Ranvir Shorey and is directed by Akshay Shere.

MALLIKA

A B-grade thriller, Mallika is about Sanjana who is haunted by vivid visions of a murder that took place in the house years before she moved in. To escape the horrific recreation of the murder, Sanjana decides to leave the house and go for a vacation to a secluded fort in Rajasthan. The fort holds its own deep, dark secret. Something that will change Sanjana’s life forever. Directed by debutant Wilson Louis, Mallika stars Sameer Dattani and Sheena Nayyar.