The Breakfast Club

I'd struggle to recall any other of Judd Nelson's films, but in this he really does shine. He's the obvious recalcitrant amongst five teenage youths who have been dragged into school on a Saturday for some seemingly rather pointless detention. This is manna from heaven for their headmaster "Vernon" (Paul Gleason), who takes pleasure in exercising his gradually dwindling authority over his charges. Whilst he leaves them to work, they set about assembling and disassembling each other's character. Nelson ("Bender") is the outlaw: loud, brash and a pain in the neck. "Andrew" (Emilio Estevez) is the high-school athlete; "Claire" (Molly Ringwald) the slightly aloof of the group; "Brian" (Anthony Michael Hall) is the swat and "Allison" (Ally Sheedy) - well she's the enigma of the group, rarely deigning to contribute as "Bender" begins an hour and a half that allows each of them to expose - sometimes more willingly than not, some of the more private and contentious aspects of their personalities. Whilst their supervisor becomes distracted in the basement with caretaker "Carl" (John Kapelos) this erstwhile disparate group of reprobates start to realise they have way more in common than they'd initially thought and thanks to a really quite potent script and some very natural performances, we begin to see something far less predicable emerging from these folks. Sure, there are some traditional stories of failed families or outrageous parental aspirations or rebellion, but they are presented here with plenty of humour and more of a degree of plausibility than in many films that just trot out the same old story arcs as if they were college lectures. There's little off limits, but nothing at all graphic as they try to find a new focus for their lives. John Hughes mixes the comedy with the more earnest engagingly here and these actors deliver something just a bit different.