Kenny Wormald (left) and Julianne Hough in ‘Footloose.’
“Footloose” won me over early, with a sequence in which the hero gets all heavy metal while restoring his badass … VW Bug. Later there is the best demolition derby involving slow-moving flaming school buses I’ve ever seen. By the time four little girls teach a dorky guy to dance to (the original) “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” I was a gelatinous blob of pure affection. Bring on “Flashdance” 2.0.
The remake retains the strongest elements and improves on some of the weaker ones of 1984’s version. This time, for instance, the leads can actually dance, and they’re both charmers. Ren, a Boston kid who moves back to his late mother’s hometown in the South (apparently Georgia) to be raised by his uncle after her death, is played by Kenny Wormald, a former backup dancer for Justin Timberlake who sulks without pouting and is cool without looking like he cares whether you look at him. With his upswept quiff, he brings off a rumor of a hint of a whisper of James Dean. He even manages to (barely) pull off the scene, so embarrassing in the original, in which he must express his rage via solo interpretive dance.
He is at least as good as Kevin Bacon was, and the girl is a vast improvement on Lori Singer. Ariel, whose brother and four other high schoolers died after a night of dancing, drinking and poor driving, is played by Julianne Hough, a “Dancing With the Stars” dazzler who is like a more luscious version of Jennifer Aniston. Her father (Dennis Quaid) is a Presbyterian minister who, in his grief, gets the town to pass a teen curfew and a ban on dancing.
He’s an excellent example of a trap the movie doesn’t fall into: Though he has shameful moments and he’s overprotective, he is at heart a good man, not a fire-and-brimstone parody. Other traps: Ren is from Boston, which always inspires ludicrous Chowderhead accents (see: Tom Hanks in “Catch Me If You Can”) — yet the movie matches geography with character. Wormald is from Boston. Nor does “Footloose,” despite a scene where Ren gets a ticket for playing his car stereo too loudly, make Southerners look like troglodytes.
Instead, it has a “Friday Night Lights” feel. It’s non-campy, emotionally engaging and respectful of the built-in drama that comes with being a teen. The best friend, Willard (Miles Teller), has a touch of “FNL” ’s affable Landry and is just as endearing. He can’t dance but that will change, thanks to those sparkling little girls.
Early on, the movie is a bit heavy-handed about the North-South contrast: Ren boasts that back in Boston, it’s OK to dance or drink. This is an odd boast coming from a resident of Massachusetts, a place founded by literally Puritanical, dance-hating religious freaks whose anti-fun policy was so enduring that liquor stores were closed on Sundays until 2004 and not until last year could you order a Bloody Mary with your Sunday-morning brunch. (Idea for movie: Party-loving big-city Texan comes to small-town Massachusetts to loosen up the prudes.)
And a fight scene at the end is regrettable, especially the bit where girls in frilly dresses beat up some guys who look like they drink Jack Daniel’s for breakfast. But, with a modified barn-raising involving a disco ball, a football player who tells his teammates to “man up” by asking some lonely girls to dance and a hoedown version of the title song, “Footloose” winds down as an emphatic American celebration.
Any who deny that this is still the finest country on earth must answer the question: In what other land would it seem perfectly natural to witness a country-rock breakdance — a hip-hop hootenanny?