Footloose -- 1984 -- PG

This film with Kevin Bacon has a far better soundtrack than storyline, though its simplistic story has some measure of uniqueness to it. It follows a boy from the city who is used to all the debauchery of the big city moving to a small town still reeling from a five year old event and all the laws passed to prevent it from recurring. The trouble is this event (involving the deaths of several teens) resulted in the outlawing of rock music and dancing, elements they believe lead to the activites that led to these deaths.

It becomes a face-off between the kid, who ends up representing the teens of the city, and the town's preacher, who represents the adults. Each side has their extremes and these are played out pretty well with some of the adults actually burning books and some of the kids openly condemning the boy's efforts.

One of the issues this film has is in its development. The kids are developed ok, and its possible a lot of this has to do with the amateurish acting by its young leads. They all act like sterotypical teens out to buck the system. This hardly creates an interesting or even sympathetic character. The show is regularly stolen by the preacher and his wife, who being played by actors of greater experience, put forth more depth than the script ever hoped to portray making their scenes far more interesting than the main storyline. in fact, they'd stolen the show so well that near the end, you could follow the preacher's dilemma even better than the kids and even felt for him more. The film even seemed to shift in his favor. This aspect is only a weakness in that the film was supposed to be about the teenagers.

The other part of this film that weakened it is its exceptional soundtrack. A lot of time was devoted on screen to its custom-written songs. So much so that it often detracted from the story so that the songs could complete.One of the special features touted that the songs tell a story. I'm sure they do, but it would be better if they told the story that was going on on screen. Unless Kevin Bacon and his conry he was teaching to dance were in a solid boy on boy relationship, "Let's Hear It For The Boy" is not the most appropriate song to accompany them.

"Holding Out For A Hero" was played under a tractor race, of all things, and I think I can understand this one a little bit, but this is how misplaced it was. The tractor race was about Bacon's character versus the teen town bigshot. They were playing chicken on tractors. Who would be "singing" this song? Why the girl, of course. She was in a relationship with bigshot, but plotwise, she would inevitably go for the new kid. Hence, she needed a "hero." Got that. But the scene is not about her, and she received very little screentime during it.

So, the film wasn't a bad thing, but it made some errors for the sake of vanity that didn't help it.