The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985)
Absentee parents. Restless children. Tie-ins. Pirate map. Criminal family. Rube Goldberg contraptions. Treasure.
All this should combine to make at the least an enjoyable, light-hearted caper. It doesn't. Richard Donner's direction is leaden and dull. The first 40-50 minutes is taken up with the excruciatingly poorly paced extrapolation of the main plot points: dislocation, anxiety, boredom, treasure map; escape, chase, hideout and on and on it goes, in pointless detail after detail. The characters are crudely drawn, and never really escape from the first impressions we make of them. The asthmatic dreamer, the realist big brother [and replacement father-figure], the clumsy fat kid, the tech-geek, the motormouth, and some girls [really, that's all I could make of them]. They talk endlessly, which can be fine, but the talk interests me very little. It's the sort of talk that people who feel the need to pointlessly say everything they're thinking indulge in, and has no movie-rhythm or pacing to make it fun.
The acting is, well, broad. Broadness, too, can be fine, but it needs to be anchored by other elements of the film, like a focused plot, a tight script, or any sort of emotional truth or depth for the viewer to empathise with. There's none. For me, all the kids were awful, as were all the adults. Even the skeletons started to sh*t me by the third act.
The exteriors were shot poorly, remarkably making the Oregon coast look, well, boring. The interiors were even worse, with the awful old cafe segueing into the ugly succession of fake amusement park caves.
The film starts slowly, drags through the character intros, and then, amazingly, when "stuff" starts to happen, it never breaks out of a slow, slow trot. One pointless arcade game obstacle after another is dispatched, with all the style and pacing of a torture chamber. Then, to wring more pain out of the deep wounds inflicted on the viewer, the finale is so unbelievably drawn out [I timed it: 8 minutes on the beach, which I could have sworn went for twice that], so flagrantly manipulative and sentimental, with each plot point being resolved in agonising, Bruckheimer-esque detail, that I was begging Donner to stop it. Please Richard, please. Make it stop. He did, only to inflict Cyndi Lauper on me. Sick b*st*rd.