Ridiculously Overrated

Rating: 3/10 (26 September 2010)

This is just one of the most overrated films of all time. Probably because of the emotional investment so many of its fans have in it, as they saw it when they were teenagers, or, just as likely, pre-teenagers. But even older critics seemed to have suspended their judgment.
Despite having been made in, and so heavily identified with, the 80's, Breakfast Club is firmly rooted in the pop psychology movement of the late 60's/early 70's. Much of the "action" In the film consists of the eponymous "club" sitting in a circle and trying to "break down" each other's "walls" (in the parlance of the times), a trope directly lifted from the 70's pop psychology Encounter Group therapy session of the type seen in films like "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice". A lot of these scenes are right out of the rule book of the infamous Synanon House of the period, where the "encounter" style was far more aggressive, and could turn into an attack on a single person. This happens a lot in Breakfast Club, to each of the characters. Most of this psychological terror is carried out by the school bully, Bender, played by then-25-year-old Judd Nelson, who incessantly harasses most of the other kids in room, who are there involuntarily, (for detention). The only "kid" (actually a 25-year old Emilio Estevez playing a kid) to hold his own against him is Andy, "the jock". There's also "the nerd", played to the hilt by Anthony Michael Hall, and "the prom queen", played by Molly Ringwald, ( about two years away from throwing her career right down the dustbin of history ). Ally Sheedy plays "the loner".
In the weird logic of Hollywood, all of this abuse just makes the kids love Bender more. Similarly, at other points in Breakfast Club we are repeatedly expected to feel sympathy not for the victims of abuse, but for their tormentors, not only in Bender's bullying actions, but in the Estevez character's whining, self-pitying (and, I might add, seemingly endless) monologue about committing some freakishly creepy sexual abuse on some poor kid. Apparently, it really hurts to bully people. The film industry, largely made up of people with Leftist tendencies, often asks us to sympathize with bullies and criminal perps, a couple of the most egregious examples being the bleeding-heart hand wringer Dead Man Walking and the South African film Tsotsi.
The "encounter sessions" in Breakfast Club are interspersed with small, generally non-sequitir vignettes of 50's-style teen rebellion, e.g., the crazy, spontaneous dance scene, backed by a soundtrack that was already dated back in 1985. This little sequence gives the movie its biggest WTF moment, when Estevez lets out a leonine roar, and suddenly a plate glass window shatters ( It plays like some weird fusion of Heroes, Dune, and Footloose ). So disjointed is this film that it seems as if several different writers were working on different parts of the movie, and when they were done writing, they just sort of patched it all together in random order.
Worst of all is the way the film resolves itself, as, for no apparent reason, four out of the five kids pair up (guess who gets left out? Bingo! "The Nerd"! How's that for a depressing message for at least a portion of the audience in a film that fancies itself "uplifting"?) In addition, the eccentric "loner" chick is turned into a clone of the prom queen (and there's another nice message, this time for the female portion of the audience: conform, girlie)!