Entertaining youth flick of grievances, self-pitying and hard-hitting home truths

Rating: 7/10 (20 July 2018)

An American comedy-drama; A story about five teenagers who are thrown together for Saturday morning detention.
This counter-culture film has a theme about American adolescence and finding common ground. It uses funny scenes to ridicule pesky authority figures and deals with the reaction of teenagers who are put on pedastals, stereotyped, struggling to keep to established social constructs in the home and in school. It has a teen film formula and uses clichÃ©s to produce pathos. Enjoyable aspects like a dance sequence is incongruous for where the story had got to, and a single setting meant the performances sometimes came across a little forced. The stereotype that was created for the character, Bender, was never fully deconstructed so there was an uneven feeling about him by the end.
The soundtrack and songs belonging to that time period blend very well with memories for a present generation of forty year-olds.