There is some truly phenomenal dancing to be found in the new teen dancing melodrama “Step Up.” Famed choreographer-turned-director Anne Fletcher knows her stuff, the kids in her movie hitting marks and turning tricks those wannabes on Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance?” can only dream of performing. The flick is truly an acrobatic tour de force, and for those into that sort of thing the final moments of this are pretty much sure to send them out of the theater giddy in enthusiasm.

Too bad she never has her main characters never really dancing together, maybe then “Step Up” could have been something special.

Well, something special in a slick, pull at your heartstrings and beat the cliché drum fiercely “Dirty Dancing” meets “Save the Last Dance” sort of way. The screenplay by Duane Adler and Melissa Rosenberg doesn’t know a twist that’s even remotely original, this story of a ballet dancing good girl and the sexy hip hop bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks about as predictable as Aunt Jemima Syrup dripping over my morning stack of fluffy white pancakes.

If nothing else, the picture is certainly cast well. Channing Tatum follows up his delightfully charming performance in “She’s the Man” starring here as down on his luck Tyler Gage, a hard luck case who never thought he’d get the opportunity to dance with a goody-goody dancing queen like Nora (Jenna Dewan). But that’s exactly what happens, the two inadvertently getting to know one another in a pick-me-up-before-you-go-go-I’ll-be-Patrick-Swayze-you-be-Jennifer-Grey sort of way. Before you can count step-one-two-three this couple is falling into romance, and damn the authority figures whom insist they should be thinking otherwise.

That this almost works is in large part to Tatum. He’s delightful (and smashingly sexy) as the smoldering Gage, his crooked smile more than enough to wash away the gloom of his glowering stare. Even better, he’s a fantastic dancer, the guy completely believable as a street-smart hip-hopper aiming for a bigger and brighter day. But he’d be nothing without Dewan, and while at first she’s too much of a bitchy Moira Kelly from “The Cutting Edge” impersonator, by the end this ice queen managed to melt my heart enough to where I couldn’t wait to see her and Tatum hit the dance floor together.

The problem is, for the most part they never do. I can get past the over-familiarity of all of this if these two could at least share a few smolderingly swanky dance sequences. Okay, so it isn’t exactly like they spend the entire picture separated (there’s one brief bit that certainly managed to get my pulse racing), but those expecting the couple to get all John Travolta/Olivia Newton John on us all have got another thing coming.

This couple might as well as be dancing in different movies, the director doing neither of them any favors by choreographing a series of (admittedly stunning) solo and group numbers. She forgets that the single most intimate thing about dance is doing it together, and the easiest way for an audience to fall with the main characters is to see them swaying around the floor wrapped arm in arm together. It’s a waste, and as spectacular as some of it is I couldn’t have cared less as I watched any chance of my emotional involvement get smashed underneath the prancing individualistic feet of Fletcher’s energetic cast.

Which is a really a shame, because like this year’s earlier dancing sensation “Take the Lead” I was really looking forward to embracing this one with open arms. Instead I left the theater shaking my head in disgust, “Step Up” failing to live up to its title and provide me with the right rhythmic beats to lift my heart and keep my feet tapping joyously. As Nigel Lithgoe or Mary Murphy might say, it just wasn’t good enough, and at this stage of the game audiences, and I, sure as heck deserved better.