N Illinois, five kids spend a fateful Saturday together in detention at Shermer High School’s library. Release Date: February 15th, 1985 MPAA Rating: Rĭirector: John Hughes Actors: Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Gleason, John Kapelos I And if you have zits now? There’s just about enough truth behind the banalities to still strike discord.Genre: Dramatic Comedy Running Time: 1 hr. So, if you had zits in the ’80s, there’s guilty retro-pleasures aplenty, like Estevez’s dance moves, an extraordinary piece of performance art that combines harassment by persistent wasp (arms) with prostate-popping squat thrusts (legs).
Really - and this is a compliment - it’s a movie for anyone who’s ever had zits. The style might be flying in from another decade (Sheedy’s makeover from chic Goth to Bridesmaid Of Minnie Mouse is as laugh-out-loud as it ever was), but the emotional baggage has survived the journey.
Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson are all volume, the last blasting out his bothers like a WWE wrestler, but Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall are great, even during the film’s more pompous moments. Over the course of eight hours, they pick at each other’s defences (fun) until an existential maelstrom hits and they come to learn some universal teen-truths (less fun). To Shermer High, then, where five Kellogg’s Teen Pack archetypes - jock, weirdo, nerd, rebel, prom queen - are assembled for an all-Saturday detention. Rather like the audience that lined the blocks to tune in and angst out. The result was a movie that’s confused, impatient, indulgent, naive, clumsy, unintentionally funny and prone to random outbursts of energy. Director John Hughes wrote the script in a fortnight, constructing a simple, one-location talkie that brought a generation’s submerged angst to the surface.
Variety was cruel at the time but, over 20 years on, has time been cruel to the Club? In the spirit of adolescent indecision, that’s a definite yes-no.Ĭalling it radical would be a stretch, yet in 1985 The Breakfast Club dressed differently from all the other teen comedies flying down the chutes. Or maybe an allergic reaction to Emilio Estevez’s dancing. In retrospect, this violent reaction to such a vanilla-flavoured piece of cinema reads like a badly informed dad’s rants. “When the causes of the Decline Of Western Civilization are finally writ, Hollywood will surely have to answer why it turned over one of man’s most significant art forms to the self-gratification of high-schoolers.” Industry rag Variety didn’t so much greet The Breakfast Club with open arms as crunch it into an armpit-lock and squeeze until the jerking stopped.