A group of miscellaneous high school kids are forced to do detention on Saturday

Rating: 9/10 (28 October 2011)

This movie is one of those movies that I see as the for-runner to movies like Empire Records and Pump Up the Volume. Here we have a group of teenagers getting together and trying to understand the nature of the lives and the world that they have entered. What we have here are the teenagers of the 80's, a time that had much more promise than the 90's, but we are here standing on the edge of the bleakness that comes out later. What we see here is that there is still a chance for friendship, but I guess the important quote comes from the lips of Brian Johnson: will we still be friends on Monday.
The Breakfast Club is about five students, all different, who are put onto Saturday detention for certain wrongs that they have done. They are not supposed to talk, but rather write an essay describing who they are. The problem here is that we are dealing with teenagers who really don't know who they are, and this comes out through the lips of John Bender, the school criminal, but essentially far more insightful than the others. They do finally find out who they are, but they do this by talking to each other and coming to understand why they do what they do, and finish off by writing a short piece telling the vice principle that he really has no idea anyway.
This movie is about identity and trying to create ones own identity. The one major thing we see here is that the students are trying to break out of the moulds that their parent's have put them in. The jock Andrew Clark is no different to the nerd Brian Johnson. The reason is that both of their parents put lots of pressure on them to succeed, but only in different ways. Clark must not only be successful at sport, but also must muck around like his Dad, but the first time he does it, he feels a huge amount of guilt for the pain of his victim. Though it was fun, he cannot help thinking about the guy who suffered.
What this movie does is that it makes us think what the point really is. Is it really worth suiciding simply because you get an F in shop, and is shop really all that stupid when somebody else sees it as his favourite subject. What we see is that five different people are coming together and learning about each other. They are being brought into different worlds, and being forced to accept those who are different. In the end they sort of all become friends, though in some cases, such as Brian, they really aren't willing to break through their prejudices.