Some people argue that older movies are classics and therefore better. This isn’t always true, but in the case of “The Breakfast Club,” they might be right. “The Breakfast Club” tells the story of five teenagers who discover friends in the most unlikely of places.
“The Breakfast Club” is the story of five teenagers who are attending an all day detention on a Saturday. The story depicts their experiences as ‘a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal’. This unlikely group of teenagers are forced into each other’s company due to their detention and find in each other things that they never expected. The students participating in the detention are Andy, the jock; Brian, the brain; Allison, the basket case; Claire, the princess and Bender, the criminal. Presiding over the detention is Richard “Dick” Vernon, the school’s assistant principal.
The five students are left in the library and instructed to each write an essay about ‘who they are’. They have the entire day to complete a single page essay so, inevitably, they get up to all sorts of mischief. Bender has a very dysfunctional relationship with Vernon so he specifically tries to incite mischief and chaos. He primarily does this by trying to rile up the other students, mostly Claire and Andy, because their stereotypical jock and princess personalities easily clash with Bender’s. While there are some stereotypical portrayals of characters at the beginning of the movie, by the end the audience sees that none of them are as simple and one dimensional as it originally seems, they all have deeper character development.
The primary example of how each of them are not what they seem is when all of the characters sat around discussing why they are in the Saturday detention. This is an incredibly moving scene as viewers see more into who each character is and how they act and why. The especially prominent part of this scene is the outside knowledge that none of their reasons for being there were scripted. The director, John Hughes, told all of the actors to improvise the scene and so each actor or actress was able to imagine their own reason why there character was there. This allowed the actors and actresses to make their characters even more compelling and intricate.
As the audience watches the character’s actions, they become more and more relatable which is one of the things that makes this movie so good. Everyone who watches the movie can find some part of one of the characters that they can connect with. By the end of the movie, all of the characters are seen in a new light. While the overall plot isn’t very intricate or particularly attention grabbing, the movie does an incredible job of showing people, real people, and how they interact. “The Breakfast Club” also successfully disarms stereotypes and shows people that humans are much more complex and confusing than people might initially assume.
All in all, it is an incredible film that will make any audience watch in fascination. Anyone looking for a good classic movie to watch should pull “The Breakfast Club” off of the shelf or go on Netflix and take a look. Watching this movie is not something that will be regretted.
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