by Richard Donner, 1985.
Starring: Sean Astin, Joshua Brolen, Jeff Cohen, Robert Davi, Corey Feldman, Ke Huy Quan, Kerri Green, John Matuszak, Joe Pantoliano, Martha Plimpton, Anne Ramsey.
Rating: 5.5/10, 4/10.
OK, so it looks like I’m going to have to defend myself again. I don’t particularly like The Goonies.
I saw it once when I was little, and I remember not liking it very much because it was dark and gross and kinda scary. And when I saw it again just the other day, I didn’t like it largely because it was dark and gross. I mean, dark and gross I can handle—I loved The Dark Crystal, say, and Nosferatu—but not when it’s as artless as this.
The plot is basically there’s a bunch of kids who are going to lose their homes to evil country club developers (that’s one thing I liked—the country club people are evil) unless they can suddenly come up with large sums of money they don’t have. But then, lo and behold, they come across an ancient treasure map where? In their attic! So they go off in search of it. Unfortunately, there are evil mobsters (or something...) around, which puts a kink in their plans. Oh no!
Most of the movie takes place underground in dark, closed-in, drippy caves with skulls and bugs and stuff, which is just gross. And nearly all the characters are really unpleasant or are at least treated really unpleasantly. There’s just a whole lot of unpleasantness in this movie, without much to alleviate it. There’s a lot of humour, I’m told, but I don’t really find much of it humourous.
Two of the characters in particular really bugged me. First, there was Cohen’s character, "Chunk," the fat one, who is humiliated, start to finish, by the other boys. And this makes sense—this is what kids are like. But in the whole movie there’s no sign that anyone in the world, including the writers and director, think there’s anything wrong with treating "the fat kid" this way. And that reall bothers me. The other one is Quan’s "Data" (ugh), the obligatory Asian character in an 80s movie. (Has anyone else noticed this? The 80s were obsessed with Asia—think of 16 Candles, "China Girl," "One Night In Bangkok," etc. etc.) And while the characters themselves don’t really seem to think about this at all, the director sure does—he revels in finding "humour" in Data’s accent, his stereotypically Asian obsession with gadgets, and so on. Hooray for racism, right?
I really wish someone would explain for me what the big whoop about this movie is.