Dir. Craig Brewer, USA, 113mins, 2011
Cast: Kenny Wormald, Julianne Hough, Dennis Quaid, Andie Macdowell
Review by Matthew Rodgers
It’s time to kick off those Sunday shoes as the “best of” remake compilation shuffles Footloose onto the contemporary dance floor.
Perhaps only a hazily half remembered teen flick that flourished on VHS and starred Kevin Bacon, sadly absent here, and a ludicrous warehouse solo strut, which is sadly evident here. Hustle & Flow director, Craig Brewer, a man who clearly understands the symbiosis of music and movies, decides to drag it kicking, screaming and back flipping into the modern multiplex.
After a prom night tragedy rocks a small town community, the local parishioners, headed by Rev. Shaw (Dennis Quaid), decide that Rock ‘n’ Roll music should be prohibited, along with public exhibitions of dancing and the addition of an enforced curfew. It takes the arrival of city slicker, Ren McCormack (Kenny Wormald) and his laughably rebellious streak to shake the dust from the populaces dancing boots.
There is something infectiously appealing about this simple and incredibly glossy little film.
The cast are uniformly charming, if mostly unconvincing; the two leads are distracting in their similarities to a young Johnny Depp and in Hough’s case, a Jennifer Aniston doppelganger, but they never have an ounce of the requisite chemistry to make their central pairing the forbidden love that the script so wants it to be, despite ticking all of the genre cliché character boxes.
Quaid doesn’t come close to Lithgow in the “boo-hiss” disapproving adult role, but his grizzly presence at least raises the acting bar as well as one or two wry smiles at the hackneyed dialogue.
Footloose ’s main foot fault arises from the fact that the key dilemmas at the core of the plot carry no tension whatsoever. Everything is resolved too easily; from the blink and you’ll miss it dust up over Ariel (Hough) to the main narrative regarding the outlawed dancing. It all falls into place so neatly that you very quickly lose interest.
The saving grace should be the prospect of numerous kinetic and brilliantly choreographed dance sequences, a la Step Up 3D ’s film saving routines, but these too fall disappointingly flat. The aforementioned warehouse “freak out” is a pale imitation of the original and the remaining set-pieces – a dated line-dancing scene and a finale barn dance – are infrequent and unimpressive.
More Strictly than Streetdance , this is harmless fluff that the kids should lap up in their droves but don’t expect it to be cherished for years to come as a home video classic.
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