Based on his features Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan, it seems like writer-director Craig Brewer has been itching to make a musical; Hustle was steeped in rap music (including the Oscar-winning "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"!), while Sam Jackson sang the blues for Moan. Without a big star and/or a Broadway hit, though, the best way to inch closer to making a Hollywood musical is to make a dance movie for teenagers, which I guess is how Brewer wound up remaking Footloose for 2011.
The famous central hook of Footloose -- that small town Bomont (Utah then, Georgia now) has outlawed dancing -- sounds hokey, and, frankly, it is. The movie even comes up with a vaguely realistic version of a dance ban -- five local teenagers died in a car accident after an alcohol-fueled dance party, leading to a legal crackdown on unauthorized teenage gatherings -- before tacking on a formal anti-dancing law, too, perhaps out of deference to the original film. Despite the inherent silliness, though, this opposition is more or less the same encountered in any teenage dance movie, almost all of which feature at least a few adults adamantly opposed to the controversial idea of teenagers engaged in wanton acts of choreography and skill; Footloose just puts it on the books and makes it official.
The dance ban is challenged by Ren (Kenny Wormald), a Boston kid and former gymnast who moves to Bomont to live with his aunt and uncle after his mom passes away. Much like in the original, hs first friend is a wiseass meta-redneck, Willard (Miles Teller); soon enough, he has his eye on Ariel (Julianne Hough), the daughter of the very same Reverend Moore (Dennis Quaid) who lost his son in the car accident and spearheaded the anti-dancing movement. The kids bond and sneak a few dances away from watchful adult eyes.
From there, well, actually the story is a little diffuse, with the rebellious yet essentially squeaky-clean Ren running afoul of various town elders, flirting with Ariel, and, yes, punch-dancing out his frustrations. There's even time for a detour into gearhead culture: Ren is also a car-repair whiz, and winds up in a vaguely pointless bus race around a dirt track. "First you're into race car drivers, now you're into dancing gymnasts?" complains Ariel's disposable boyfriend Chuck (Patrick John Flueger), which may or may not be a sly commentary on teenage trend-chasing ("may not" getting a boost from Chuck being portrayed as an abusive, bullying jerk).
For awhile, this episodic, relaxed approach to the material makes Footloose surprisingly natural, paying actual attention to teenagers' relationships without turning them into CW soap suds. Teller in particular has natural timing, and he develops an easy rapport with Wormald. This is no small feat: dance movies are often faced with the unenviable decision of whether to hire actors who can't dance or dancers who can't act. For his male and female leads, Brewer has chosen dancers, but they're charismatic enough as actors, too. Boston-accented Wormald could fit in as a long-lost Wahlberg or Affleck sibling, and his looks have a touch of early James Franco; he may not go as far as any of those guys, but he passes the dancing-actor test. Julianne Hough, apparently a Dancing with the Stars mainstay, has a bell-ringing walk -- subject of some dialogue and even more (understandable) camera-ogling from Brewer -- coupled with an unfortunate nasal voice, but in this sort of movie, the walk is more important, and she generates warm (if not quite piping-hot) chemistry with her costar.
The dance sequences are fun, and well-filmed by Brewer. In addition to that musical itch, the director has a natural swagger to his filmmaking, and he knows how to maintain fast-cut music-video energy without obscuring the action. The music choices are eclectic, as far as they go: a little parking-lot hip-hop, a Big & Rich country line-dancing sequence; even the punch-dancing sequence, which should be laughed off the screen in the wake of Hot Rod, has a little charge, scored as it is to the White Stripes song "Catch Hell Blues" (and augmented by some impressive gymnastics).
But it turns out there isn't quite enough dancing to get a stronger sense of Brewer's mixtape skills, which allows the tributes to original Footloose songs to dominate: as in the first film, Willard learns to dance to "Let's Hear It for the Boy," while of course the finale must be set to the title song. Both of these sequences are fun -- the introduction of "Boy" is particularly clever -- but they don't leave enough room for newer sounds, and the movie lacks a dance sequence as memorable as the very best of the Step Up sequels. Moreover, the movie's back half makes dancing secondary to the idea of dancing, which is to say the screenplay opts for family melodrama and a big speech in front of the city council. This may be unavoidable from a plot point of view (and they were also in the original film), but the movie is less freewheeling, and less affecting, as a more serious drama.
Yet this is a pretty good remake of Footloose: good-hearted, sincere, enjoyable, not too stupid. If it's not Brewer's most indelible portrait of the South, maybe it's not such a bad way to bring him back into the studio-filmmaking fold. He has an eye for detail and atmosphere not fully utilized by an eighties remake, even one that's better than necessary; if he serves his remake time, maybe he'll eventually get to do a real musical.
