Sigh. Where to start with "How She Move"?

The grammatically incorrect title is the least of this film's offenses.

"Move," a production of Paramount Vantage, which has produced its share of winners, and MTV films, which has produced a lot of stinkers, veers toward the latter category.

It stars Rutina Wesley as Raya Green, a prep school student who, following the drug-related death of her older sister, must go back to her old school in the ghetto. She yearns to return to a good school so she can follow her dreams of going to med school.

Where she lives is hard to ascertain. There are mentions of "Brooklyn" and "Queens," but the finale takes place in Detroit, and most characters have Jamaican accents.

Somewhere along the way, Raya gets mixed up with old friends (and enemies) and decides to get into a step-dancing competition.

The film has no heart, no spark. We're not led through a story, but dragged kicking and screaming to a tired, unimaginative climax, with cliche speed bumps slowing us every step of the way.

The acting is bad, the pacing is off, and the dance sequences, while well-choreographed and well-filmed, are uninspired and pedestrian.

The dialogue is hopelessly misguided and terribly untrue to its characters. One moment they're speaking some semblance of urban slang, the next they're saying things like "keep your professional conflicts confined to your own time, won't you?"

One character comically seems to be channeling Barry White by way of Fat Albert. He's meant to be vaguely menacing, but comes off as caricature.

Little care is taken as to the integrity of the story. Characters who were angry at each other suddenly are not without explanation. The main character switches dance teams no less than three times, including once in Act Three, during a $50,000 competition. Would the judges allow that?

There are technical errors as well. Take a look at the car windows during the climactic dance sequence.

When Raya switches dance teams, not only is she able to learn/relearn old routines, but the entire team learns all-new, impossibly complex routines in a single day, and Raya gets a form-fitting uniform, complete with a stitched name tag.

Step-dancing is an impressive art that has made for more interesting movies. The makers of "Move," though, appear to be on a moneymaking venture thrown together in hopes that the teenage target demographic will like it.

Hopefully they'll step on by and pass this one up.