Synopsis
When teenager Ren and his family move from big-city Chicago to a small town in the West, he's in for a real case of culture shock after discovering he's living in a place where music and dancing are illegal.
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Cast
- Kevin BaconRen McCormack
- Lori SingerAriel Moore
- John LithgowReverend Shaw Moore
- Dianne WiestVi Moore
- Chris PennWillard Hewitt
- Sarah Jessica ParkerRusty
- Jim YoungsChuck Cranston
- John LaughlinWoody
- Elizabeth GorceyWendy Jo
- Frances Lee McCainEthel McCormack
Recommendations
- 80
Variety
By writing both the screenplay and contributing lyrics to nine of the film’s songs, Dean Pitchford has come up with an integrated story line that works. - 70
Chicago Reader
The musical sequences are good enough that they make you wish Ross had been willing to leave the surface realism behind and break out into the high stylization and exuberance of the genre's classic days. Despite the hesitations, it's miles above "Flashdance" in technique and intelligence. - 70
Newsweek
The bottom lineis that "Footloose" has a lively, sweet, infectious spirit, and for that one is willing to overlook some clunky scenes, fuzzy motivations, gratuitous brawls and the failure to evoke this town with any sociological coherence. It works because Bacon, always a fine actor, and Singer make a golden and winning couple; because Lithgow invests his ogreish character with troubled and compassionate shadings; because of Christopher Penn's scene-stealing performance as Bacon's naive lug of a friend; because the rocking sound track features hot new songs like "Let's Hear It for the Boy," performed by Deniece Williams; and because everyone, fundamentalists excepted, will identify with the kids. [20 Feb 1984, p.78] - 63
New York Daily News
Footloose turns out to be a sort of Boy Scout version of “Flashdance,” a carefully toned-down, overly respectable piece of schmaltz. - 60
IGN
The movie is predictable and formulaic and all of those things, but it's great in spite of itself. - 50
The New York Times
Christopher Penn very nearly steals the movie as Ren's hayseed friend, and the two share a musical scene (to Deniece Williams's ''Let's Hear It for the Boy'') that's almost as sensational as the opening credits. - 38
Chicago Sun-Times
Footloose is a seriously confused movie that tries to do three things, and does all of them badly. It wants to tell the story of a conflict in a town, it wants to introduce some flashy teenage characters, and part of the time it wants to be a music video. It's possible that no movie with this many agendas can be good; maybe somebody should have decided, early on, exactly what the movie was supposed to be about. - 30
Time Out London
Ross, who began his career as a dancer and choreographer, brings plenty of gusto to the material and the performances are ebullient, but this is still a cynical and manipulative exercise with little feel for the teen culture it purports to celebrate.
