Review of The Outsiders (1983) by Japes . — 09 Feb 2011

As someone who read the book, I can honestly say this is a very shitty adaptation.

The characters in the movie are painfully shallow. It's really, really hard to care about the characters because the movie tells us so little about them. Boys from the gang like Steve and Two-Bit just kind of appear on screen, and are never properly introduced. Even though I read the book, I was still like "who the hell are those guys?". It wasn't until after the credits I realized who they were supposed to be.

The characters overall are very underdeveloped. Johnny was beaten up pretty badly in the book by the Socs, making him very nervous around strangers. In the movie, it showed Johnny being uneasy around strangers/Socs, but it never really went into detail about why. The "why" part is a pretty vital part of the story. That was only one of the many plot holes in this movie. The number of plot holes in the Outsiders is astounding.

The movie also didn't go into depth about the relationships the boys had with each other. Pony had a tight relationship with his brother Soda, and a pretty rocky relationship with his other brother Darry. Darry and Soda are very important parts of the plot, yet they only get maybe 10mins of screen time. Dally and Johnny also had a very unique relationship with each other, yet you barely see that relationship in the film.

The scenes in the movie were taken from the book, but they were all thrown together in a random fashion that made it hard to understand the movie, if you hadn't read the book. The transitions from one scene to the next didn't make any sense either. Especially the beginning, when Pony starts writing his essay for school. It never goes into WHY he was writing or what it was for.....it doesn't even say what he's writing about! Major scenes were also cut from the movie like Pony getting beaten up after walking home from the movies. That's actually the very beginning of the movie, and it's where they go into detail about each greaser.

The pacing was also very off. The movie cuts half way through the book, and starts at the part where Pony, Johnny and Dally are at the movies. From there the movie just takes off, and everything happens too fast.

Overall this was a poorly directed film. It had the potential to be great, since the book was pretty good, but somehow the director managed to screw it up big time.