 |
| Why don't they ever use this for the DVD box art? It's one of my favorite 80s poster designs. |
The
Goonies (1985)
Dir. by Richard
Donner
Starring Sean
Astin, Josh Brolin and Corey Feldman
[content warning:
ableism and brief mention of fat-shaming]
Plot:
A group of
kids from Astoria, Oregon, whose homes are about to be demolished to make way
for a country club, attempt to follow a map to the hidden treasure of the
legendary 17th century pirate One-Eyed Willie. In the process, they run afoul of a family of
criminals, who decide to make an attempt for the treasure themselves.
Nostalgia:
By the time
I was eight years old, I’d watched our taped-off-TV copy of this movie so many
times that the tape wore out and had to be replaced. I pull it out and watch it again once every
couple of years now, but I can still quote large portions of the movie from
memory.
Review:
When critics
bemoan that Hollywood doesn’t make kid-oriented adventure films anymore like
they did in the 1980s, this is probably the movie that they have in mind when
they say that. Even though Steven
Spielberg only produced the movie (written by Chris Colombus and directed by
Richard Donner), it’s often seen as one of the quintessential “Spielbergian”
adventures. I’ve even heard
Ready Player One described as “Goonies + Willy Wonka”, which
is actually what made me decide to check it out again for this week’s review.
I’d say that
the movie still holds up as an adventure today, even if a lot of the cultural
references and some of the humor is now quite dated. While the main cast is not incredibly diverse
(there’s only one person of color in the core group of kids, and only two with
more than 30 seconds of screen time), it’s fairly well-rounded in terms of
personalities and character types. The
casting director also hit the jackpot, landing not only an established child
actor (Corey Feldman had already been in Gremlins and two
Friday the 13th movies), but both Sean Astin and
Josh Brolin in their first screen performances.
 |
| One of THE quintessential 80s casts |
This movie
is also frequently cited by critics when talking about how movies these days
are hesitant to put child protagonists in any real danger. And yes, there’s quite a lot of peril that
these teens face, both from the increasingly elaborate traps made by One-Eyed
Willie and the pursuing Fratelli family, who at one point threaten to chop one
of the kids’ hands in a blender, and seem about to go through with it before
they’re interrupted. The whole thing is
definitely reminiscent of the first Indiana Jones movie, with the scale of the
dangers toned down to fit the age of both the characters and the target
audience. I can’t really speak to how
scary some of the images are to the average kid viewer, since I’d seen it so
many times by the time I was a teen myself that I can’t remember my initial
reactions. But I can see how some of the
set pieces (Chunk being trapped in a freezer with a dead body, the pipe organ
sequence, and all of the dead bodies on the ship, for example), might have been
a little much for some viewers. But I
still wouldn’t hesitate to show this to someone in their early teens, and maybe
a little younger.
Of course,
having watched a version taped off of TV so many times, it does strike me when
rewatching it as an adult how much they managed to get away with under the PG
rating in 1985. There’s more swearing
than in most modern PG-13 movies, the aforementioned dead bodies both fresh and
skeletal, and a rather graphic closeup of a replica of Michelangelo’s
David as the kids attempt to glue back on a certain “piece”
that got broken off. They don’t even
have the excuse that the earlier movies Gremlins and
Temple of Doom did, as the PG-13 rating was introduced a
full year before Goonies came out. There’s also Corey Feldman’s character,
Mouth, whose antics were meant to be funny (and probably still are to a lot of
people), but come off as crass and dickish to me as an adult viewer. These include fat-shaming Chunk into
performing a humiliating dance when he first shows up at the house, and a scene
where he takes advantage of the fact that he’s the only one in the house who
speaks Spanish, and deliberately mistranslates everything that Mrs. Walsh says
to her new Latina cleaning lady to make it sound more shocking and obscene.
Finally, I
want to bring up the movie’s treatment of the character Sloth. There’s definitely an argument to be made
that it’s both ableist and – is “lookist” the right word? – about the
character, who is kept chained in a room in the Fratelli’s basement until both
he and Chunk escape together and follow on the trail of the rest of the
characters. He is initially seen as a figure of terror by the kids, and as an
embarrassment to be hidden by the rest of his family. However, the character is ultimately a
sympathetic one, and not judging someone by their outward appearance is one of
the themes of the movie that the character highlights. Once Chunk gets over his initial fear, he
becomes friends with Sloth, bonding with him so much that he’s willing to
shield him with his own body when the police pull out their guns at the end of
the movie. His treatment at the hands of
his family is meant to paint them as irredeemable, and Sloth is eventually the
hero of the film, saving the Goonies from his family and holding open the
tunnel outside long enough for them to escape.
So yes, the
movie might show its age in a couple of respects, but I still have great
fondness for it, and definitely see why it’s still held up as a model for teen
adventure movies by so many people.
There have been rumors about a sequel for years, and I’d definitely
watch it if it were to ever happen.
Maybe my niece will be old enough by then to introduce her to it.
Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A-
Stray
Thoughts:
-I talked
about how lucky they were with their child actors, but they also had some great
adult actors as well. The Fratelli
brothers are played by a then-unknown Robert Davi and Joe Pantoliano, and
ubiquitous 80s actress Mary Ellen Trainor (seriously, she’s in Lethal
Weapon, Die Hard, Romancing the Stone, Scrooged AND Monster Squad) plays Mrs. Walsh
-There’s a 99.99% chance that the first time I heard either the
James Bond or Superman themes was in this movie.
-Hey! You! Guuuyysss!
No comments:
Post a Comment