The Goonies (1985)

PG, but this is 1985 PG.  Man, I had to really beg my wife to let my older kids watch this movie.  The '80s were a very special time where kids could wander the neighborhood for friends and watch content that would be deemed offensive in this era.  I'm not trying to be a Boomer here.  I'm just saying that The Goonies has a ton of swearing, some sexual humor, a fake suicide, a modest amount of ableism and racism.  Still, I wanted my kids to watch it, which may be a bigger commentary on myself than anything else.

DIRECTOR:  Richard Donner

These all tend to be excuses to pat myself on the back.  I have this video game that is just waiting to be played, but my obsession with being productive is getting in the way.  If I'm lucky, I'll be able to take a chunk out of The Walking Dead: The Telltale Final Season.  But with my wiring saying that I need to do things that tap into my productivity, here I am writing The Goonies blog...before I knock out Wicked possibly tomorrow.

We don't get movies like The Goonies very often.  This was a movie that I've seen so many darned times that I was probably being insufferable quoting it with the film as my kids watched it for the first time.  Now, I have to wonder.  Is there some gender lines with considering The Goonies as a modern classic.  My son loved the movie.  He watched it with me and we bonded.  He kept quoting parts of the movie after it was over.  ("Hey Mikey, you gotta use the batroom?")  But my wife and daughter seemed put out by this one.  Sure, they were second screening, which automatically makes the primary movie being watched garbage.  But I thought that my oldest daughter would be all over this movie.  I mean, we wouldn't have Stranger Things if it wasn't for movies like The Goonies.  It's why Sean Astin is in season two of Stranger Things.  The kids-in-peril genre has kind of gone by the wayside.  Disney still puts kids in peril, but those tend to be well-behaved children.   Instead, I love the idea that slightly naughty kids with good hearts do something great. The French are good at that.

The funny thing is that I didn't realize how simple this movie is.  Like The Lord of the Rings, The Goonies has a group of protagonists heading in one direction to complete a quest.  With Lord of the Rings, that story forces the group apart with an attempt to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.  But with The Goonies, the group is split up with an ultimate reunion with One-Eyed Willie's pirate ship.  But in my mind, that adventure was massive.  I remember them being underground for so long.  They had earned their treasure because they were gone for so long.   Not so much.   A lot of the movie is above ground, giving us more context into what the Goondocks are all about and how the Goonies fit in this.  I mean, the term "Goonies" is never well defined.  We can understand from context that Goonie is a little bit of a synonym for "outcast."  But the movie does this thing where we are meant to understand that this group of children has been on numerous adventures prior to this moment.  With the case of the film, the hunt for One-Eyed Willie's treasure may be their most grandiose adventure.  However, there is this flavoring to the film that this group keeps on getting into shenanigans.  

Maybe that's what I love about the movie so much.  I have a lot of problems with The Avengers.  It's not a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination.  It just spends a lot of time with growing pains.  It does everything it can rejecting the call to becoming a team.  For a movie called The Avengers, we don't get to see them as Avengers all that much in the film.   But with The Goonies, the movie sacrifices an origin story for the sake of immediate adventure.  From moment one, The Goonies are The Goonies. Sure, it splits them up.  That's just good storytelling.  We have multiple threads that all come back together.  Also, the absurdity of the adventure is never questioned.  The movie starts with a bleak scene of a fake suicide.  We get this gritty story of criminals escaping prison.  Now, a traditional tale would make The Fratellis the only conflict in the film.   Maybe have Mikey or Chunk witness a murder and it becomes Home Alone, just not at Christmas.  But the main story is the hunt for One-Eyed Willie's treasure.  If anything, the real criminal is late stage capitalism.  (Note: We're in an era where capitalism is the bad guy for a lot of movies and people wonder while I'm so vocal about the woes of the poor.) 

And the crazy thing is that Donner manages to balance an incredibly absurd set of circumstances.  Brand yells at Mikey that no treasure is worth their lives and he's absolutely right.  But because the only way to escape the Fratellis is to accept the call to adventure, all of the conflicts work in crazy harmony.  To save the Goondocks, the Goonies need to escape the Fratellis and find their way to freedom.  There is one point where the kids can reject the call.  It's a great scene.  It's the "Troy's Bucket" scene. In the real world, Troy's Bucket is a valid way out of this movie.  They are still on the run from the Fratellis.  But the fact that they, as characters, have evolved that much in that little amount of time makes them have this bond.  Also, there's the idea that they had gone farther than Chester Copperpot is oddly encouraging.  By the way, I always used to give Chester Copperpot crap for dying so early.  They find him so early in their adventure.  I was wondering what kind of crappy adventurer he was.  But Copperpot is also the guy who set off the booby trap ("That's what I said!  Booby traps!").  As much crap as I give him, he didn't have the benefit of knowing he'd be killed for simply investigating caves.

I'm exploring this thought right now, but my favorite dynamic in the movie is Stef and Mouth.  Mikey and Brand have conflict.  Most people don't get along with Mouth.  Everyone teases Chunk.  But Stef and Mouth actively dislike each other from the beginning of the movie.  Maybe the end is a little undeserved with them being so sweet to each other.  But these two end the movie with simple understanding of each other's personality.  Yeah, there's hilariously a light romantic overtone to that moment.  Maybe I'm reading into it more than other people are, but I oddly ship them.  But maybe not romantically.  Yeah, I take that back.  It's there, but I don't want that dynamic to happen.   It's just that they seem to genuinely care for each other.

Why aren't there more movies like The Goonies?  I mean, part of it has to come to having been done perfectly.  Every so often, we get attempts.  My example is Super 8, but that doesn't work as well.  I feel like the '80s was the perfect era for kids-in-peril movie.  Maybe it's because we had latchkey kids taking care of themselves.  The old man in me is thinking that the advent of the cell phone and video games have changed how kids hang out.  But it also seems like there's something wholesome to the boys' crimes that doesn't read in 2020's America.  I have to say, I loved this movie after not having seen it for over a decade.  Sure, a lot of it was nostalgia.  But I still think that The Goonies is a really funny and suspenseful movie with an ensemble cast that just works together.