The Good

A strong film that shows off the power of expression through dance.

The Bad

I wish there was more information on how one could learn to dance like this.

In Stomp the Yard the song may remain the same as far as the story goes, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth listening to or watching. This film follows DJ (Columbus Short), a new entrant in college who has a knack for dancing. At Truth University this gets nurtured by way of fraternities that take part in "steppin'" competitions. After joining the ONO house DJ gets wrapped up in this dancing world, but he's too much of an individual styled dancer and this causes some friction. He also falls for April (Meagan Good) and suddenly his life is sent into a tailspin because he's got more on the line than he's ever had before.

It would be wrong to say that Stomp the Yard is a wholly original movie. This film follows a pretty well worn storyline of a bad kid makes good, and it also seems to say that if you work with a group (instead of by yourself) you will achieve the greatest results. What is the most original about this movie is the "steppin'" competitions that have played a big part in African American life both on and off campus.

Features

Battles. Rivals. Brothers. Featurette

In this featurette we get to go behind the scenes of Stomp the Yard. We hear from the cast and crew as they tell the story of this movie, talk about their roles and then we are taken into this world of steppin'. Now, if you have seen the movie (or you take part in this form of dancing) you probably won't get too much out of this. However, if you know nothing about this form of dancing I am sure that you will enjoy this segment a lot more.

Deleted Scene and Extended Scenes

Filmmaker Commentary

Sylvain White and a bunch of other people who made Stomp the Yard take part in this commentary track. I hate to be a buzzkill but this thing was really boring. They talk about making the movie but I never got any of the passion that I felt they should have been putting across. In fact, the most interesting thing for me was just watching the film again and not really even listening to White and the others. In fact, it got so bad that I eventually turned this off about 45 minutes in simply because I figured that it wasn't going to get too much better.

Video

2.40:1 - 1080p. This movie looked really solid. Even though most of the dialogue scenes are done by the book, I appreciated how the dance scenes looked. Although, at no point did I feel like even though I was getting solid subject matter (and a glimpse into a world that I heretofore didn't know about), I never thought that this movie was gritty, rough or any of the things that it seemed like it hoped that it would be.

Audio

English PCM uncompressed 5.1. English Dolby TrueHD 5.1. French Dolby Digital 5.1, with subtitles in English, English SDH, French, Chinese, Thai, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean. Much of the power that this film has comes with its booming audio. In fact it was because of this that I think Stomp the Yard probably played with so much power in the theater. I found that there was a rich and full quality across every aspect of this film's audio layout. It seemed to play very strongly across the system that I accessed this disc on.

Package

The cast of Stomp the Yard stand dancing in unison on the front cover of this Blu-ray Disc. The back has some images from this film, a description of what this movie is about, a Special Features listing and technical specs.

Final Word

Normally, I don't think I would have ever seen Stomp the Yard. That said, when this movie came out and made a ton of money it got my attention. I hate to put it in such callous terms but I was wondering what this phenomenon was? Then I realized that this was yet another example of the unpredictability of the cinema marketplace. However, if something is made for an audience and it's marketed correctly, it can really catch fire and satisfy viewers that might otherwise go undeserved. This movie appears to have done that.

All that said, I don't know if I would call Stomp the Yard a good film, but it certainly has appealed to people because they are getting to see something that they normally wouldn't.

Stomp the Yard was released May 16, 2007.