Starring Charlotte Rampling and Nichola Burley. Rating not available.

The dance movie is, by now, well-trampled territory. We’ve even been there, done that, when it comes to the 3-D dance movie. StreetDance, Step Up, Save the Last Dance, Street Steps, Save the Last Step—it’s getting confusing, and the interchangeable titles don’t help when you’re served up a vacuous script that’s just filler between pops, locks, and toprocks.

At first it seems like the London-set StreetDance’s only fresh offering is that everyone has a cute British accent. Otherwise, it’s the usual setup: two crews are getting ready to battle it out at the big competition. The underdogs, led by feisty Carly (Nichola Burley), a blond with an unending assortment of carefully slanted Yankees caps, can’t seem to find a practice space.

Enter Charlotte Rampling as a cougarlicious ballet mistress who invites Cally’s crew to use her dance school’s veddy, veddy tony studio—with the caveat that they use some of her prize students in their act. (She wants to give them some fire: “We drill the passion out of them.”) It’s around this time that StreetDance, despite some iffy acting and corny premises, finally starts to break new ground and win you over.

Okay, so it’s far-fetched as hell. But it’s fun to watch the ballet dancers, in their slippers and leotards, try to bust a move and for Carly to come up with some new hybrid between the forms. Surprisingly, it’s even more fun watching a romance light up one of the shy male ballet dancers and the sweetly charming way it is treated by directors Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini.

As for the dance sequences, they’re not nearly as off the hook as they were in Step Up 3D. Or was that Step Dance 3D?