John Hughes' Spruce Goose Equivalent

Rating: Null/10 (12 February 2004)

Like anyone with a set of eyes and a video cassette recorder I'm favorably disposed to a great number of John Hughes movies (what's there not to like?) but "The Breakfast Club" is a bit of a porker. A bit like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" without the humor and the action -- I can only suspect that Hughes got a whiff of the vapors and wanted to do a "serious", "introspective", "sensitive" movie for a change and for me it just didn't work out. Though lots of other commentators obviously think otherwise, but then there's got to be some people who keep Schwarzenegger in office and the Twinkie-makers in business. The characters are unintentionally, comically overdrawn -- the prospective prom queen with a rich beemer-drivin', divorce-undergoing daddy, the bad-to-the-bones-but-really-quite-sensitive-rebel who rebels so hard as to make Charles Manson look like a pushover, the brainy nerd with an overambitious mom and latin-, math- AND physics-club memberships (and he's a virgin and his mum packs his lunch), the disturbed artist chick with self-harm-, body hygiene- and eating disorder-issues and the jock, who's just a complete jock, OK? And then there's the evil teacher (why does everyone in this forum think he's the principal? which principal has to go in on a Saturday to supervise detention?) and the janitor with a heart of gold who's really a philosopher. Not just a social dropout. In short, it would have been nice to have at least ONE character who's not from the teen-movie identikit. Next, the plot is so paper-thin (some kids bond during a really long and tedious detention) that some gratuitous action scenes were thrown in just to get some movement on the screen -- too bad that John Hughes didn't care to think the plot through more thoroughly when he was writing it. (But to compensate he chose to throw in that totally patronizing and sappy ugly duckling makeover -- goth chick puts on some lippy, a white dress and a hairband and instantly bags a boyf -- bring me a bag, I think I'm going to be sick.) Then there's the predictable blame-it-all-on-your-parents mumbo jumbo which seems to have been lifted straight from the great book of teenager psychology (in my experience, teenagers may think like that but they never talk this way -- and if they do, I don't care to see a feature-length movie about it). And finally, at the end everyone acts like they have had this life-changing experience and jump-started a revolution.
But I'm being a bit harsh. The acting is generally very decent (totally unlike today's teen movie fare) and I give Hughes credit for trying to take a compassionate, engaged view on teenagers. So overall it's a movie that bears watching, even though it consider it to be far removed from it's ascribed cult status.