The Breakfast Club - review, 6/10

Rating: 6/10 (13 March 2018)

The movie is about five different teenagers - 'a brain...and an athlete... and a basket case...a princess...and a criminal' who are locked up together for a day of detention. I won't lie, this sounded like a boring movie to me but I watched it anyway to 'culture' myself on iconic movies of the '80s... or something.
I'd heard that this movie really got teenagers, and maybe it did at the time but the characters don't really hold up as much as they might have in the '80s. The protagonists are clear-cut clichÃ©s of the cliques that usually exist in Hollywood's stereotyped high-school movies, these kind of social groups don't really exist anymore (if they did at all); nowadays the athletes hang out with the brains, the princesses hang out with the basket cases and the criminals... I don't know who they hang out with but the point I'm making is that I don't think a modern teenager can really relate to the teens in this movie. Saying that, the main point that the movie grapples with is exactly what I just said - that brains, athletes, princesses, basket cases and criminals can and should be friends but I feel that this argument is now about a decade too late to relate to which sometimes makes the teenagers feel somewhat 'alien' to me.
The one thing that I really thought the movie got right was the actors, they're really excellent and spoke authentically about the universal experience of being a teenager (minus the weird cliques). They were the focus of the movie and carried it well until the end, listening to their stories and watching them form friendships was fun to watch and there was enough humour and quiet moments for you to just start to unravel the personalities of the five lead characters which, in my opinion, makes the movie interesting enough to watch.