Footloose (2011)

You Can Stick a Quarter in That Girl’s Back Pocket and Tell if It’s Heads or Tails

I have fallen out of touch with my once-beloved RedBox.  Finding myself with two days off in a row, and extremely bored, I decided I should see what I’ve been missing since the last time I stopped in.  I picked up 4 movies, two that I expect to be crap and two that I think have potential.  I decided to start off with one of each, and also the two movies that are remakes of classic movies from the 80’s.  I’ve seen the movie that started tomorrow’s movie, but I’ve never seen the original of today’s movie.  Why?  ‘Cause I could give a shit about movies about dancing.  That being the case, I still picked this movie up because I expect it to be pretty crappy.  But I’ve been wrong before, so let’s see what I thought about the remake of Footloose, written by Dean Pitchford and Craig Brewer, directed by Craig Brewer, and starring Kenny Wormald, Julianne Hough, Dennis Quaid, Miles Teller, Patrick Flueger, and Andie MacDowell.

After a night of drinking and dancing, Bobby Moore and four of his friends are fucking around in their car and get killed in a head-on collision.  In reaction, his father, Reverend Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid), convinces the city council to pass a bunch of unconstitutional laws banning anything that someone might consider fun.  Three years later, Ren McCormack (Kenny Wormald) moves to the city from Boston to live with his aunt and uncle after the death of his mother.  He quickly makes friends with Willard Hewitt (Miles Teller) and finds out about the town’s strict restrictions, deciding to call it “Wicked Queer”.  He runs afoul of the law a few times (all for things that weren’t his fault), and also runs across the rebellious daughter of the reverend, Ariel (Julianne Hough).  At some point in this movie, it is safe to assume that young Ren will kick off his Sunday shoes and attempt to cut loose.

Having never seen the original, I went into this movie with only the most basic of assumptions.  The movie manages to go above my low expectations.  That may or may not be a compliment.  It’s okay, but the part of the movie that I liked the most won’t really be mentioned until the next paragraph.  The story of this movie tries really hard to make sense of the fact that dancing has been made illegal in this town, and it occasionally comes close to making sense.  I’m sure that there are some crazy religious towns in the world, but I feel like any laws that outlawed dancing could probably be fairly easily overcome.  But you get the idea, and it’s their flimsy premise that they use in order to remake a movie that probably had no real reason to be remade in the first place.  And, best I can tell from my limited knowledge of the original, this movie borders on a shot-for-shot remake.  The only part I’ve seen is Kevin Bacon’s crazy little angry dance, and they throw that nonsense in this movie too.  I don’t really understand the concept of getting so angry that I just gotta dance, but if that’s your stress relief, knock yourself out.  I’ll stick with masturbation.  Surprisingly, there was some shit that didn’t make sense to me in this movie, and a lot of it was tied to some pretty shitty dialogue.  Ren and Willard first meet in a way that makes you think they’re going to fight, accidentally bumping into each other in the hallway which, of course, is the greatest insult you can give.  Except for the one Ren follows up with, saying “If you weren’t wearing all that camouflage, maybe I could’ve seen you!”  Deep burn, Ren.  How’d you ever manage to get a friendship going after that one?  At the end of the movie, Ren’s trying to make his case to the very religious city council, and his big idea is to read every quote in the Bible that uses the word “dance”, regardless of whether or not it actually fit what he was trying to say.  And then, at the very end of the movie, they have a school dance and play “Footloose” again.  I understand that it’s the name of the movie, and I even understand that it’s a mighty catchy tune, but it’s also the song that everyone was listening to at the very beginning when all those kids died.  Wouldn’t it ruin the mood to have everyone instantly remember that at something that was supposed to be fun times?  The biggest problem for me was the entire premise of the movie.  I guess that’s probably not a good thing.  I hate dancing and pretty much refuse to do it at any point unless it’s for a laugh, so when Ren gets so determined to overturn this law against it, I couldn’t help but thinking there were probably more important uses of his time.  Trying to bang the bejesus out of Julianne Hough, for instance!  The music is another fairly important part of this, and most of them worked out pretty well.  Footloose is a solid song, and the remake of it at the end of the movie is okay as well.  The slow, acoustic version of “Holding Out For a Hero” was not as good as the original.  The rest of the songs were pretty good.  The dancing was … yawn … moving on.  It was fine enough, but I have no interest in it.

The performances were my favorite part of this movie, but pretty much for only one reason.  Gundamn that Julianne Hough is hot!  She is so gorgeous and has the world’s most bangin’ body.  Every scene in this movie she was in, I was completely distracted by her.  Every other scene, I was waiting for her to come back.  There was a long scene in the middle of the movie where Ren joins a bus race against her boyfriend, and the scene was a waste of my time and pointless, but the only thing that made it worth paying attention to was the fact that she gets down to her bra in it.  And every time she started dancing, I finished.  Let’s just leave it at that.  Even though I was so happy to see her character, the character itself annoyed me.  I hate those girls that are so smoking hot and could probably have any man in town but still decide they want to start dating the not that attractive guy that treats her like shit.  And then, at the end of the movie, she’s arguing with her dad about how he should stop treating her like a child and her big argument is, “I’m not even a virgin anymore.”  Yeah, ’cause nothing says you’re mature like handing your pussy out to some random shithead that treats you like crap.  I would’ve slapped her in the face for that statement.  Thankfully, her dad did it for me, so I didn’t have to stop being a gentleman.  She also had a nice bit of acting in that scene that caught me off guard, but I’m gonna go back to thinking about how hot she is.  Kenny Wormald did his job well enough, but I felt like his Boston accent was either affected or annoying, and possibly both.  He just seemed to try too hard with the accent.  Miles Teller’s character never hit home with me since I found him fairly annoying, but I did like him a little more in the fight at the end of the movie.

This is a hard movie to recommend.  If you’re a big fan of movies based on dancing, then you’ll probably like this.  If you’re just a fan of movies, this movie would probably only be able to reach mediocre for you.  If you’re a fan of the original movie, you will either like how similar they are and prefer an updated take, or be sickened by the fact that this movie is not the original.  The only type of people I can say will enjoy a good portion of his movie is people who like women.  That Julianne Hough is worth watching all by herself, if you’re into that kind of thing.  And I am.  I got this movie from RedBox, and it WAS better than I expected it to be, but I still wouldn’t say there’s a whole lot of demand for you to see this movie.  The remake of Footloose gets “That’s sexier than socks on a rooster!” out of “Our Lord is testing us.”

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