Dear Hulu: What Were You Thinking When You “Recently Added” 'Staying Alive'?

One thing the release of T2: Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s sequel to his breakout 1996 classic, Trainspotting, reminds us is that there is something irresistible about revisiting iconic movie characters years, or decades, after their classic adventures turned them into screen icons.

What, we wonder, might Michael Corleone be getting up to a couple of decades after having poor, hapless Fredo offed? How has Jake Gittes come to terms with the stinging, bloody mess he bitterly walked away from on the streets of Chinatown? A second round in the priapic melodrama of Tony Minero?

We buy tickets or tune in to find the answer to those questions, as well as these: Can the actors reanimate the characters that left a powerful stamp on our psyches. Can the screenwriters and directors capture lightning in a bottle a second time. The jury is still out on T2, though the reviews have been generally positive. But the answers are generally no, and the results run from diminishing returns to troubling breaks in internal logic to unmitigated farce.

Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes in The Two Jakes is lifeless compared to the sharp-tongued firecracker of Chinatown. And there’s absolutely no way Michael Corleone would ever see — let alone reminisce and make nice with — his banished wife, Kay (“It was an abortion, Michael, an abortion!”), as he does in The Godfather III, a fruitless attempt to turn the saga into a trilogy.

Which brings us to Staying Alive. Not many would put Saturday Night Fever on the level of Chinatown, The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II, all three among the greatest achievements in cinematic history. But it is nonetheless a stone-cold ’70s classic. If you’re of a certain age, admit it: When you come across it on TV, you can’t help watching. Against the backdrop of the Bee Gees’ unparalleled soundtrack (five No. 1 hits), Saturday Night Fever was gritty, dirty, and real in its depiction of randy Brooklyn teens. And the dance scenes are transcendent.

So it was almost inevitable that someone would make a sequel. That someone turned out to be no less than Sylvester Stallone, who wrote, produced, and directed the 1983 feature, and even had the sense of humor, or hubris, to insert himself in a blink-and-miss-it cameo à la Hitchcock.

Staying Alive can be summed up pretty quickly: Tony is in Manhattan now, trying to land a gig as a dancer in a Broadway show; he has his old girl Jackie but is infatuated with a rich dance diva. Two thirds of the movie is tights-legwarmer-banana hammock dance studio, audition, and rehearsal sequences. Ultimately, Tony becomes lead dancer in a kinky dry-ice and strobe-light epic of Wagnerian length called Satan’s Alley. He dances and gesticulates with ferocious brilliance, bringing the crowd of old, white theatergoers to their feet. The movie ends as Fever began, with Tony strutting to “Staying Alive,” this time through Times Square triumphantly.

In short the movie, despite John Travolta’s pumped physique and game efforts to present a reasonable facsimile of Tony Minero, is lousy.

So ultimately, the question is why, on a lazy Saturday night, with so much quality fare available on the various streaming services — for example, I was just a few episodes from being caught up on Mozart in the Jungle on Amazon — did I pull the trigger on Staying Alive?

All I can do is take my hat off to the curators at Hulu: You know how to exploit the value of nostalgia and novelty. You envisioned me sitting on the couch, with a dish of Turkey Hill in one hand and the clicker in the other and no desire to be challenged intellectually or in any other way. Not only did I start the movie, for shits and giggles, but the goofy spectacle of it kept me watching right until the final credits.

You got me, Hulu. Well played.