'The Goonies' (1985) Movie Review

Today we are going to recall the childhood movie of an entire generation. The Goonies which is one of the iconic culture films of the Eighties, Richard Donner´s film we all saw in the cinema and which we will never forget.

An adventure movie that is really entertaining, very much a family film but with a special touch.

Storyline

A criminal escapes from prison and some kids are searching for the treasure of One-Eyed Willy, in order to save their family home. All of them will experience an adventure that will mark their young lives.

Movie Review

Everything ages and no matter how much we love them: The Goonies has aged and has been copied so much that the original seems a little forced today but more because of the weight of accumulation of the copies than the movie itself which is still fantastic.

A film full of humor with a dizzying rhythm and a story telling sense that is very classic with obvious references to R. L. Stevenson (very entertaining not only in Treasure Island). The movie wants to be a show and achieves this, but does so with a studied screenplay that treats children or teens as intelligent beings able to react in a classic story: it does not teach anything nor has a moral, the movie does not overdo grotesqueness, but the film has sub-plots, characters, movement, all told in a good way and in a way that today we consider fluid given the amount of narrative colesterol we need to consume.

This was a commercial movie in its day, born and created to be a box office hit because (never forget it), movies cost money and this was and still is a business: but business can be done making us return to the cinema by giving us stories like this one or silly films with bad structures we are forced to consume nowadays.

The film is fast paced in the tone of young investigators in a group novel for young people, adding Treasure Island and giving it the American touch of the times in which the United States had a flavor of the United States and we were all delighted with its freshness, at least in the movies (here we don´t delve in politics).

The dialogues flow as quickly as the situations, offering twists, jokes, double entendres that complement the situations: either kids of back then were more intelligent than those of today or something has happened to screenwriters.

And, no, kids of today are not dumber, let nobody be fooled by this.

Watching it again has the aftertaste of familiarity and little by little the film wins you over with a “Spielberg factory” guy who was tremendous, making each film of the company a revolution and transforming terror in Poltergeist into something digestible for kids and teens.

The Goonies is a clear example of how to turn a commercial work into something well told, effective and intelligent, worthy to be watched again.

Our Opinion

In case it is not clear enough: I have been delighted by it and this movie should be watched by your kids: an intelligent movie made at a time in which nobody calculated the emotional incidence of a joke as an adult of your kids; one simply laughed and that was it.

Well, here you are entertained in an intelligent way and that´s it.

Even if it is for kids.