Saturday is det time!

Rating: 6/10 (18 March 2006)

Watching this seminal 1980s movie certainly stirs feelings of nostalgia: I'm roughly the same age as the film's central characters, and my school also had Saturday detention (although not quite in the form depicted here). With its archetypal characters, essentially static, dialogue-driven scenes, and internal dance routines, 'The Breakfast Club' is actually quite theatrical; but not without merit. On the downside, there's a dreadful period soundtrack (Simple Minds, anyone?) and some of the incidents are a bit obvious and ploddingly handled. But offsetting this, there are also plenty of genuinely funny and true to life moments. What is a pity the film is somewhat overbalanced by Judd Nelson's character; for sure, he's meant to be an attention seeker, but Nelson just seems too old for the part, more like a man pretending to be a boy than a real angsty teen. In the movie's second half, the character is quieter and the benefits are clear. The film has a crowd-pleasing bias towards the pupils in detention (as opposed to their teacher), and it ends with one of those make-overs beloved of Hollywood teen-movies, where the plain girl becomes beautiful (but only if you have a certain aesthetic preference). However, there's still more to think about about than in the average movie of this genre, not least the idea that the power of one human over another is always (in some sense) applied through consent. And compared to the likes of modern successors like 'American Pie', there's a sweetness here lost in the last 20 years.