a good 80s film, but then again, who likes the 80s?

Rating: 5/10 (5 July 2004)

2 1/2 Stars: The Breakfast Club was arguably the most definitive teen angst film of the 80s, but then again, the 80s were a pretty bad decade for teenager films so that's not saying much. The film is about a group of five high school students who are forced to spend a day-long detention with each other.

The group comprises of a jock, a bully, a nerd, a beauty queen and a freak. These are five of the most blandly stereotypical characters ever to appear in a film, and even though this is a deliberate action designed to give the actors leverage so that they could more easily be dynamic later in the film, it's blatantly obvious.
The teenagers, interact with each other in ways that they otherwise wouldn't have had they not been forced to spend a Saturday together. The strongest part about the film is that there's a lot of good dialogue as the ragtag group starts going through the mundane activities of trying to stop the school bully from getting them in trouble or asking for a piece of gum, to having conversation in which they get to know each other and finding they all had more in common, than they realized.
However, if ever a potentially good film was set back by the ending, The Breakfast Club would have to be one of the best examples. If the idea was that these teenagers of different social classes were going to learn that they had more in common than they realized and eventually tear down those barriers, than why does the film end with the status quo, where the beauty queen ends up with the bad boy, and everyone gets together with someone except for the nerd who ends up having to write the group paper?