the breakfast club

The Breakfast club (1985) is a comedy-drama film directed and written by John Hughes. The plot revolves around 5 high school students, each part of a different stereotype; Judd Nelson plays Bender the ‘criminal’, Claire the ‘princess’ is portrayed by Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez takes on the role of Andrew the ‘athlete’, Anthony Michael Hall plays the ‘brain’ Brian Johnson and Ally Sheedy is Allison the ‘basket case’. The film starts with the students being stuck in Saturday detention together to write a 1000 word essay on who they think they are and they realize that they have more in common than they thought. In my opinion ‘The Breakfast club’ included some good elements, I thoroughly enjoyed the scene were the students opened up to each other, because you could empathize with them, especially Bender who comes across as really tough, but then you realize he’s so rebellious as a result of being abused by his father and having a dysfunctional family. However in my opinion the director didn’t focus enough on entertaining the audience, who could easily get bored of the scenery, which is a high school detention room for the whole of the film. This resulted in me losing focus half way through watching it so the end message didn’t come across as strongly as it should have. John Hughes could have improved this film by ensuring that the film kept the audience focused all the way through, so the end message could be easily shown without having to concentrate hard all the way through. He could have also made the film less cliché, because it seemed like any high school film but with a slightly more effective moral to the story.