Hicksville: "Footloose"

By anybody's standards - but especially by the standards of mid-1980s cheese - the original Footloose really wasn't that bad: directed with respect by Herbert Ross, and capably performed, it gave rise to at least a couple of era-defining pop records (Kenny Loggins' title track, and Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy"), plus the diverting sight of Kevin Bacon sticking it to the Man (or to the Farmer, presumably) by dancing atop a tractor. The film benefitted from that weird socio-temporal conflation which saw the 1980s replaying all the notes of the ultra-conservative 1950s: the idea of repressive small-town values being boogied around surely couldn't fail to strike chords with young viewers around the time of the Reagan administration, with its family-first and Just Say No policies.

Craig Brewer's much-delayed yahoo remake - first conceived as a vehicle for Zac Efron, then for one of the Gossip Girl guys - recognises at least the musical achievements of Ross's film, replaying Loggins's theme over its opening credits, but the latter-day teenagers we observe stomping their feet to it are dancing ironically, with smirks on their faces - and so busy smirking at their own hipster appropriation of the music that four of them promptly drive headlong into a truck. This is the cotton-milling town of Bomont, Georgia, a tiny berg whose very name should tell you the locals don't go in for fancy-pants behaviour, not least in the field of spelling; grief-stricken after this smash-up, the town's elders have closed ranks, seeking to protect their young by imposing a curfew and banning loud music and lascivious dancing.

Into this repressive atmosphere, there arrives out-of-town heartthrob Ren (Kenny Wormald), your hero for the evening. (We know he's the hero, because Brewer helpfully layers a countrified cover of Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For A Hero" over his first arrival.) Inevitably, Ren's quiff and sharp moves catch the blue eyes of local babe Ariel (Julianne Hough, something of a trainee Aniston), but this spark immediately sets him in opposition with her father, a Luddite preacher (Dennis Quaid), who rails against cellphones and ATM machines in his sermons. This is about as complicated as Footloose 2011 gets; elsewhere, it quickly becomes clear some of the original's innocence has shuffled off stage right.

Nobody makes these things for fun anymore; they do it for money, to capitalise on the recognition of a particular brand, or cash in on an emergent craze. So it is that Wormald crunks more than I can recall Bacon doing, alongside a crew whose jackets are plastered in product-placement logos; so it is that we get some line-dancing, to a number entitled "Hey Mister, Won't You Sell Me A Fake I.D.?", thrown in as somebody's idea of a bonus. Quaid can't bring himself to summon up the full-on fire-and-brimstone of John Lithgow's preacher in the original, so he too falls back on a half-smirk ("hey kids, I can't believe some of the things this guy is saying, either!"), which robs the film of its only meaningful antagonist.

Brewer is too busy pointing stuff out to the slower members of his audience to correct him. When Ariel first descends into the cauldron of the local stock-car arena, one middle-aged man is observed behind her taking a phone pic of her behind, because she's a hot piece of ass. On his first day at his new school, Ren is swiftly surrounded by female classmates twittering "he's cute, he's cute", because, apparently, he's cute. (In actuality, Wormald shares with the porcine Bacon the characteristic of not being quite as sickeningly cute as an Efron or Chace Crawford would have been.) By the point one of Ren's contemporaries is having to draw a figure of eight in the sand, to show what a figure of eight looks like, most viewers will have been led to the conclusion the American education system is pretty much screwed.

If you're looking for yet more evidence of the infantilisation of the American mainstream, you may also want to consider the way "Let's Hear It For The Boy" is deployed in the two Footlooses: unironically - to the point of introducing a note of homoeroticism between Bacon and his trainee dance partner Chris Penn - first time round, but here filtered through the squawking of a couple of six-year-olds, and their shiny Barbie tape recorder. Brewer, whose Hustle and Flow was given serious Oscar consideration not so very long ago, has some ideas about the kind of small town where a plaintiff in court might legitimately refer to the judge by his given name, but the thrust of the film seeks to rewrite the original by the rules of our current cycle of streetdance movies, whose few, rattling braincells reside very firmly in their feet: the finale, not so much 50s or 80s as cro-magnon, is nothing more than a punch-up in a car park.

It's a fine and worthy idea to have a mainstream multiplex product rise up against the way society now habitually mollycoddles its youngsters - Pixar recognised as much, in setting out on Finding Nemo - but while Footloose 2011 stumbles almost unknowingly across the potent metaphor of Bomont's kids being literally packed in cotton wool, elsewhere Brewer and his cast default on the hard work required in making teen-rebellion material that originated a half-century ago relevant for a 21st century crowd: there just isn't enough sweat, and Ren's triumph ultimately lies less in cutting loose than in cutting through one council's draconian health-and-safety legislation. I preferred the Fame rehash.

Footloose is in cinemas nationwide.