Footloose (2011)

It’s impossible to discuss Craig Brewer’s remake of Footloose without comparing it to the 1984 original. I normally don’t like to do this—it’s only fair to treat each film as its own entity—but this is a strange case because Brewer is so intent on recreating the original film as faithfully as possible. Scenes here play out in an almost identical fashion, even down to the lines of dialogue. The story is the same, the characters’ names are the same, and the costumes are often exactly the same. This should kill Brewer’s Footloose almost immediately, so why does his film feel so much more vibrant and fun than the original ever did? I won’t argue that Footloose is a masterpiece, but it’s relatively astonishing in that it succeeds far more often than the first while changing almost nothing. Even when it does alter the original story, it’s often for the better. Footloose creates a world where, despite the frivolous plot, quite a bit actually feels at stake. The conflicts here are more interesting, where the original never wanted us to worry about anything else beside Kevin Bacon’s desire to cut a rug. Footloose serves no real purpose, but this about as well as something this silly could possibly be done.

If you are familiar with Footloose in any of its incarnations, you already know the basics of the plot. In this case, city boy Ren McCormack is played by professional dancer Kenny Wormald. After the death of his mother up in Massachusetts (another departure from the original) he moves in with his aunt and uncle in the small country town of Bomont, Georgia. At first, he has a hard time fitting in. He’s pulled over for blasting Quiet Riot, as kids these days do, and he’s generally seen as a no-good liberal Yankee city boy who needs to keep his music down and his drugs to himself. When he learns that dancing and loud music has been banned because of a bad car accident years before, he teams up with the kids of Bomont to bring back the dancing and Kenny Loggins music. Meanwhile, he begins a romance with Ariel (Julianne Hough), the daughter of the local preacher (Dennis Quaid) who has been quarterbacking this whole anti-dance movement.

This is all preposterous, of course. It was a dumb premise in 1984, and it remains so in 2011. Yet, in rather miraculous fashion, this new version somehow sells its premise more than the original. While it is admittedly too faithful to the original in many respects—to get full marks, a movie must be its own thing—any changes made by Brewer and company actually deepen the characters and thus make it all the more engrossing. This Footloose actually shows us the accident that prompts the dance ban, and creates a new, more believable family dynamic when it comes to Ren’s new home. In the original, Ren’s family was hardly ever alluded to. When they were, it was just to create more shallow conflict. Here, the death of his mother makes him slightly more sympathetic, and his new family actually cares about him and wants to keep him out of trouble. Where his family in the original placed the city over Ren, here they support his cause because he’s, you know, their family. Is it really all that believable that so many would support the absurd dance ban? I don’t think so, and neither does Brewer.

The worst elements of the Footloose story are still quite obvious, including the “iconic” dancing-in-the-warehouse scene that’s just as laughable as ever. And from a plot perspective, the ending still feels rushed and unearned. Plus, it’s a freaking remake of Footloose. Yet Brewer seems to understand that his source material was flawed, and with his remake he sought to update while also ironing out many of the wrinkles. While such an endeavor is wrongheaded on the whole, he asserts himself quite well here.  No, this movie didn’t need to be made. But it was, and the only thing we can do is judge the movie that was made. And you know what? It’s a whole lot of fun. More than it has any right to be.

Grade: B