Fridae

There's something to be said about the original Footloose: it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. Even in 1984, it was preposterous that a town in the agricultural belt would ban dancing, loud music, and organise book burnings of Slaughterhouse-Five just because the title of the book sounds obscene. Despite the goofball premise, the guilty pleasure of original Footloose is watching a dance musical pitting a teen rebel is against a small-minded conservative town, organising its youths to overturn or at least flout its most ridiculous rule ever. And part of that pleasure is watching Kevin Bacon play a young man with such roguish charm that even you would want to hide your sons and daughters from him, no matter how pure he says his intentions are.

There's another thing that could be said about the original Footloose: it would be near the back of the long lists of retro films we'd imagine being remade, simply because there isn't a need to remake it. Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan) evidently disagrees. He even finds a way to set the remake in the modern day too.

While the film plays out almost exactly as the original did, sometimes line for line, often musical number for musical number, and almost always with the plot development, the remake suffers badly from its inability to suspend logic. It fails to convince us how on earth a small town in the 2010s would end up being this socially and morally repressive. It fails to convince us a reality exists where socially conservative townsfolk who keep old Heavy and Hair Metal band albums in their garages would ban loud music being played in cars.

Kenny Wormald, despite being a far better dancer than Kevin Bacon, fails to convince that he's the boy you'd want to hide your daughters from. In fact, he's so apple-pie and boy-next-door in this remake, you'd want to hide him from even the preacher's daughter. Dennis Quaid is possibly miscast as the conservative preacher – each time he goes on about the dangers of dancing and rock music, you'll have visions of him setting pianos on fire as Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire!

As multiple incongruities pile on, the effect is unintentionally corny. I sat through the film imagining at some point, there will be a revelation that we're actually watching Hot Fuzz 2, and the elders of this unreal, anachronistic small town have been killing off their wayward teenagers to preserve their vision of an untouched, innocent, sinless community.

That being said, if you don’t pay too much attention to the plausibility of the film (and it is far less plausible than the original), you might actually find it entertaining anyway. If you didn't know the original, you wouldn't probably realise how watered down this remake is.