If you’ve ever seen Pimp My Ride UK, the chilly isles’ version of the popular MTV show, you’ll understand the toe-curling embarrassment of watching host Tim Westwood – a white man well into his fifties who thinks it’s okay to pair a baggy tracksuit with oversized costume jewellery and say things like ‘drop da bomb’ – attempting to be Britain’s answer to Xzibit. What if the Americans see this, you worry. They’ll assume this is the best we’ve got. That the Brits doing ‘street’ is the equivalent of your granddad getting down at a wedding.

The very same feeling is inspired by StreetDance 3D. England’s version of Yankie-cool urban dance films such as Save the Last Dance and Step Up starts with a bunch of awkward Brits in big trousers funnelling street-talk about their ‘crews’ through weedy southern-England accents. Commendable that we should try to break away from Richard Curtis-penned rom-coms and Mike Leigh kitchen sink dramas, you think, but this is a bit pathetic.

Still, you’re unlikely to approach a film called StreetDance 3D for intricate character studies or even a plot, which is good because you won’t find those things here. The story, insofar as there is one, concerns a dance crew ditched by their leader just before the street dance championship finals. Bereft of a figurehead and rehearsal space, the crew is offered use of a nearby ballet school by dance teacher Helena (Charlotte Rampling, more wooden than the floorboards on which they’re dancing), on the condition they include some of her ballet students in the routine. The dancers from opposing disciplines hate each other, can’t work together, but might romance bloom? You know the rest.

The extra dimension is an irrelevance, but these kids can certainly dance. Much of the cast is made up of real street dance crews, plucked from their success on TV’s Britain’s Got Talent, so while acting is not their strong point, there’s plenty to impress here (though the big finale is anticlimactic – the dance-off in a club in a previous sequence is much better).

Yet the film’s extraordinary lack of heart – something that Save the Last Dance, as much about reconciling black and white American cultures as melding hip-hop and ballet dance cultures, had in spades – is a missed opportunity. Why not use StreetDance to smuggle in a comment on inner London’s kids channelling their energies into healthy competition over council-estate warfare? But it’s been banged together in such a hurry –
no doubt to capitalise on the TV connection – that evidently it never occurred to anyone to actually say something.