Review of The Goonies (1985) by Ben L — 31 Mar 2015

As someone who did not grow up watching Goonies I have the unique position of being a child of the eighties with zero nostalgia for this movie. And let me tell you, watching it for the first time as an adult is an ideal situation to realize it is a horrible film. I don't even know where to start with this movie. Many defenders of Goonies will say that this is one of the more accurate representations of what children are like, if that's the case I'm glad I don't have any! Every single kid in this thing is extraordinarily annoying. They all either whine, mumble, or screech their dialogue in such a fashion that I want to tell them to just shut up. But it's not just the sound of their voices that annoys, these kids are horrible to each other. They mock their friends, call each other names, and only seem to care about other people when death is on the line.

Now if I'm really going to accurately criticize this film, I've got to delve into the plot. This is one of the worst contrivances of plot I can imagine. So a pirate steals a ton of gold and then harbors his ship in a cavern somewhere in Oregon. Already stupid, but we'll move on. Then he sets up a number of complex death traps in the caves which lead to his ship's cavern. Then he sends out a map into the world with directions to the cavern along with a couple clues written in Spanish (which translate into perfect rhyming English) on how to reach the cavern. Then he returns to his ship to die counting his money, but not before setting more traps on his ship. Fast forward hundreds of years and somehow this map ends up in the attic of a crazy family, and is found by a group of kids who are about to lose their homes because some corporation is foreclosing on their parents. So these kids (who appear to not even know the word "treasure") decide to seek out the ship in hopes that the "rich stuff" will help their parents magically be able to avoid moving, and all this mere days before they were set to leave. And the crazy part is, despite being pursued by a family of bumbling criminals, this stupid plot actually works.

I do have the ability to suspend my disbelief, but this movie pushes it to the utter limits. Perhaps if the setting and tone of some of the scenes wasn't so shockingly serious I'd give the movie a pass as silly kids' movie nonsense. But there's some dark stuff in here, including some traps that could have come from The Temple of Doom, and the kids are cursing up a storm so it's not exactly wholesome for the whole family either (that's not even mentioning the psychotic torture stuff that Mouth tells the housekeeper in Spanish.) It's the juxtaposition of this dark life-threatening stuff against the cartoony silliness of a boy being saved by plastic teeth on a slinky that bothers me so much. It's kids mocking a fat clumsy neighbor and then letting him into the house using an unexplained Rube Goldberg machine. I could continue, but needless to say there is literally nothing I like in The Goonies. It is one movie that I cannot imagine anyone enjoying unless they have the emotional, nostalgic connection.