Five Teenagers in a Library Shouldn't Be This Good
Nerdy Up North
The setup
Five students from completely different high school cliques spend a Saturday in detention together. What begins with arguments, insults and assumptions slowly turns into a day where each of them admits there is far more going on than the version everybody else sees.
The Breakfast Club is basically five teenagers sitting in a school for most of its runtime. No huge plot twist. No big adventure. Just people talking. Somehow it is still more engaging than films with ten times as much going on.
John Hughes understood that being a teenager can make every problem feel like the end of the world, even when an adult looking in thinks it is nothing. The characters all arrive as stereotypes. The brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal, and the film spends the next ninety minutes showing why that is nowhere near enough to describe any of them.
Judd Nelson gets the loudest material as Bender, and there are times where he is such a prick that you wonder why anybody in the room puts up with him. But when the film starts showing what his home life is like, it does not excuse him, it just explains why he is constantly looking for a fight.
Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Anthony Michael Hall all get their own moments as well. The conversation where they admit they probably will not all be friends on Monday is one of the most honest parts of the film. Spending one intense day together does not magically erase the social world waiting outside the library.
There are things that have aged awkwardly. Some of Bender's behaviour towards Claire would be treated very differently now, and Ally Sheedy's makeover still annoys me because the film takes a character whose whole thing is refusing to fit in and then basically says she just needed a bit of makeup.
But the central idea has not aged at all. People are more complicated than the box you put them in. That is simple, but The Breakfast Club says it incredibly well.
Positives
Excellent ensemble chemistry, genuinely memorable dialogue, each character gets proper depth and the film understands teenage insecurity without talking down to it.
Negatives
Some of Bender's behaviour has aged badly and Allison's makeover sends a weird message compared with everything the film had been saying about accepting people.
Verdict
The Breakfast Club is one of those films that looks simple until you realise how hard it is to make five people talking in a room this memorable. Decades later, the characters still feel recognisable.
