Kenny Wormald  and Julianne Hough in Footloose.

Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough in Footloose.

Reviewer rating:

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Reader rating:

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars (24 votes)

Craig Brewer's remake of the 1984 hit about the small town that prohibits dancing among local teens begins as a post-9/11 allegory: following the death of five high-school students in a post-party car crash, a law instituted by a grieving father, the Reverend Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid), bans ''lewd or lascivious dancing'' and other inappropriate activities.

Quaid's character rails against technology and the disintegration of family values but his value as a contemporary Tea Party symbol is negated by the mid-1980s setting and the movie's desire to duplicate the original.

Ren McCormack, the Yankee interloper who challenges the system, is played by former dancer Kenny Wormald and, like Julianne Hough as Moore's headstrong daughter, Ariel, he doesn't need a double to pull off the moves.



The trade-off is workmanlike acting; Hough, especially, lacks in comparison to the willowy melancholy Lori Singer originally gave Ariel.

With Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan, Brewer demonstrated a feel for music's connection to personal torment and, while he doesn't have the same connection to dance, transferring the fictional town of Bomont from Utah to Tennessee allows for a racially diverse cast and eclectic soundtrack.

Key scenes, such as Ren teaching his friend Willard (Miles Teller) to move, are re-created but the teen rebellion of Herbert Ross' first picture is now complicated by an insular focus on dealing with grief.

Having both lost someone they loved, Ren and Moore react in diametrically opposed ways and there's no modern equivalent of the extremes, such as book burning, stirred up by John Lithgow's original man of faith. The choreography is sometimes overly complex.

Wormald and Hough don't look or dance like adolescents letting off steam; their professionalism overwhelms what should be a simple pleasure. The film sometimes has the same problem.