Breakfast Club

Rating: 7/10 (22 August 2016)

"The Breakfast Club" is simply a story about a few teenagers who spend a whole day in detention and talk to each other. The beginning of the movie struck me as a bit ordinary, because I felt that these students embodied caricatures of the prom queen, the jock, the nerd, the goth girl, and the rebel without a cause rather than three dimensional human beings. At the early stages of the film, only Judd Nelson was able to inject new life with a fresh performance as a troubled, aggressive young man with so much anger building up inside him and occasionally rising to this surface.
Yet as the film entered its second act, a strange thing happened to me. I found myself becoming absorbed in the lives of all its young characters. These students, away from the teacher's glare, were sharing their deep personal pain and this was fascinating to watch. Lastly the final act was really a metaphor for healing as these young people consoled and healed each other with love. This psychological portrait not only makes for very good entertainment, but is quite touching. So while "The Breakfast Club" is not without its weaknesses, I recommend this film particularly for its second and third acts.