The Breakfast Club (1985) Review

J.R

It’s hard to make five people sitting in a room interesting. It’s especially hard to make five people sitting in a room interesting enough for a ninety-seven minute movie targeted at teenagers. But somehow John Hughes succeeds in making The Breakfast Club interesting. Though it is lacking in jokes for a Comedy/Drama, spare a few moments in the ‘smoking’ scene, it delivers on creating a fun (if not especially fun-ny) character-driven drama.

The main five characters making up this movie’s ‘Brat Pack’ (Emilio Estevez as Andrew ‘Andy’ Clark, Judd Nelson as John Bender, Molly Ringwald as Claire Standish, Anthony Michael Hall as Brian Johnson and Ally Sheedy as Allison Reynolds) are each based on a high school stereotype. Estevez/Andrew is the sporty Jock, Nelson/Bender is the Rebel, Ringwald/Claire is the popular girl, Michael Hall/Brian is the nerd, and the film describes Sheedy/Allison’s character best as the ‘basket case’. While these initially bland stereotypes are certainly not the character types you want to be stuck in a cinema with for an hour and a half, as the film progresses and the characters open up to eachother and test their limits, we see more developed personalities. Besides these five, there are only two other characters onscreen for more than a few seconds: Paul Gleeson as Richard Vernon, the strict teacher stereotype who is forced to stay at the school with the students (who is also given a little development through his outbursts of brutal honesty against Nelson’s character Bender), in addition to the John Kapelos as Carl, the school janitor, a source for comic relief.

Emilio Estevez may be the first name on the poster, but the real star of the film is Judd Nelson as John Bender, the rebellious member of the group. While Nelson’s certainly not fooling anybody into thinking he’s a high-schooler, his character is the catalyst through which the others open up. However, by the end of the film it was hard to entirely understand the other characters accepting him, after he had been established so concretely as an unlikeable ‘jerk’, his only initial redeeming qualities being his amusing attitude and one-liners. Additionally, it’s hard to see why Claire was entering a relationship with Nelson’s character by the end of the film (eight hours is a short amount of time to go from introductions to kissing in front of your parent’s car even if he weren’t so unlikeable), particularly after a scene in which Bender is strongly implied to have made an invasion of Claire’s sexual privacy while she was covering for him by lying to Mr Vernon.

With films like this, you find yourself identifying with a character. Admittedly, mine was Brian, which I wouldn't be nearly as embarrassed about were it not for the fact that the Hughes probably thought himself a genius for naming his character an anagram of 'Brain', the title given to Brian in his closing (and opening) monologue of the film. Thus, I found Brian's character very interesting and watchable (and made me more eager to discover his reason for being in detention if he were such a teacher's pet, revealed in the Confession Circle scene, which I will come to later).

Aside from that, I have very few issues with the movie, mainly just little things that detract from the realism, such as the teacher not acknowledging the noise the students make even after he previously scolded them for making noise (Yes, I know, I’m picky. Deal with it).

The Confession Circle scene is doubtlessly my highlight of the film, with the film not sticking to the ‘cutesy 80s high-school comedy drama’ script, with Brian asking if they’ll all still be friends on Monday, and Claire giving him and the audience the cold hard truth that for the sake of High-School clique culture, Brian and Allison not be able to be friends with the others. The scene is very well done, giving real emotional weight to the discovery that decades on, life in high-school has barely changed. 

Overall, it’s well worth a watch. Just don’t go into it expecting to be wetting yourself with laughter, nor crying your eyes out. It’s a fun exploration of five characters and high school's unspoken laws mixed with 80s fun.