By Bob Thompson
The remake of Footloose almost didn’t get to cut loose. First, High School Musical director Kenny Ortega dropped out of the project in 2009, followed by High School Musical star Zac Efron. When Efron’s replacement, Chace Crawford of Gossip Girl fame, quit the production, all seemed lost.
At that point, the new Footloose, based on the 1984 teen flick starring Kevin Bacon, was anything but fancy-free. But a series of fortunate events, including the hiring of writer-director Craig Brewer, led to new energy and a revamped movie musical, which opens in theatres on Oct. 14.
In the update, Kenny Wormald from MTV’s Dancelife fills Bacon’s role as Ren, a rebellious teen from the city who moves to a small town after his mother dies. Dancing with the Stars veteran Julianne Hough plays Ren’s love interest, Ariel, while Dennis Quaid co-stars as her father, the town preacher who wants to ban dancing after his son is killed in a car crash returning home from a shindig.
As in the original, Ren, the hoofer, gets reprimanded for his pop-culture ways by the townsfolk, who don’t take kindly to his loud music and hip shaking.
There are other similarities. In the new version, just like the old one, Ren does his angry dance in an abandoned mill, and teaches his awkward buddy Willard (Miles Teller) a few moves in preparation for a beyond-town-limits dance party.
The familiar 1980s chart-toppers from Footloose also show up in the retooling, but with a slightly modern makeover.
Instead of Kenny Loggins belting out the title track, Blake Shelton puts a little country in the new version; Ella Mae Brown’s down-home rendition of Holding Out for a Hero spruces up the Bonnie Tyler number; Almost Paradise, originally rendered by Heart’s Anne Wilson and Loverboy’s Mike Reno, gets reworked by Nickelodeon’s Victoria Justice and Nashville newcomer Hunter Hayes; and One Tree Hill’s Jana Kramer does a quasi-cover of Deniece Williams’ Let’s Hear It for the Boy.
At first, Brewer didn’t seem like an appropriate choice to direct the remake: His claim to fame was 2005’s edgy Hustle & Flow, and the raunchy Black Snake Moan (2007). But during a recent Toronto interview with headliners Wormald and Hough, Brewer said his obsession with popular music helped him shape Footloose. So did his reverence for the original film.
“I struggled with the idea of re-doing Footloose,” he admits. “When I first read that they were remaking it, I remember thinking, ‘That’s a bad idea.’ ”
In fact, the director says that when the studio first called him after Ortega quit the project, “I took a pass.” He finally changed his mind, he says, because, “I always wanted to do something with country, rap and rock ’n’ roll in one movie.”
Both Wormald and Hough have nothing but praise for Brewer, who rewrote the screenplay with an eye for social awareness.
“It’s so refreshing to do a teen movie with this much substance,” Hough says.
“I liked the fact that Craig kept the Footloose beats you couldn’t skip,” Wormald says, “but added some new cool 2011 things.”