The Breakfast Club tells the story of an unlikely group of five high school students, brought together by the fact that they are all to spend a Saturday in detention. The teacher in charge expects them to sit still at their desks and write papers - not likely.
(I can't do an entire paragraph for the plot. That is the whole plot.)
The movie starts off with a bit of physical comedy and then descends into a series of non-sequiturs. Director John Hughes seems to want to take us into the minds of the kids who we think we know inside and out: the popular girl, the jock, the nerd, the ne'er-do-well, the weird kid who doesn't talk to anyone. Unfortunately what we find there is emptiness.
I think the largest criticism I've leveled so far - that the sequence of events is haphazard and nonsensical - could also be said about Empire Records, a movie I really liked. But the difference between Empire Records and The Breakfast Club is that in the latter, the characters don't care about anything. Or want to be anything. It's suggested in the end that they care about at least each other, which certainly surprised me after they spent the entire eight hours of their confinement bullying and intimidating each other. In fact, (and I'll be deliberately vague to avoid spoiling anything) a 'romance' emerges after a male character basically sexually harasses a female character until she breaks. Gotta love it. I found nothing to sympathize with in any of these five miserable people, and I think that while the actors did the best work they could manage, they didn't have a lot to work with.
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