A film of great potential... and little payout.

Rating: 5/10 (2 September 2010)

Honestly, I expected a lot more out of this movie from the beginning. It is famous: a cult classic, and I would have certainly hoped it a deserved title. The set up is interesting: a character driven story about five total stereotypes locked up together for an extended period of time. Of course, as the movie progresses, the characters began to feel less like stereotypes and more like people as so they should in any movie, and I found them believable (for the most part) as people, but their interactions were utterly contrived. For a character driven movie, it really felt like the writer had no idea who the characters were: they simply slipped out of themselves constantly doing things that they obviously would not as people have done, such as Brian and Andy smoking pot in the library. Mostly, the end is ridiculous. It is as if the writer simply said "Damn, I'm out of pages, I guess I'd better make everyone fall in love." There was a ton of potential here, and the payout was in small nuggets of real humanity. That's the beauty of a character driven plot: the humanity of it. The Breakfast Club felt like somebody wanted to make a good movie, but thought nobody would go and see one, so made a mediocre one. A good try, but not a success.