Ah yes, The Goonies. Released in 1985, The Goonies was a gigantic film project that marked a significant collaboration between Richard Donner (the director of Superman), Chris Columbus (the writer of Gremlins), and Steven Spielberg (the director of that one episode of “Marcus Welby, M.D.”). It was an enormous hit at the time, and was instantly beloved by the young audiences who went to see it. Its rollicking adventurousness and relatable child characters, not to mention its dirty sense of humor, have carried The Goonies into a strange untouchable pantheon of 1980s classics. The film is still held up by an entire generation as one of the best kid flicks of all time.
Thanks to a heavy rotation on cable TV, the myth of The Goonies has only grown with time. This is the kind of movie that Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers see in droves at midnight screenings. People have memorized this film. They have decorated their cars with its iconography. The dialogue from this film has become a kind of pop culture holy writ. I think only Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Ghostbusters are quoted more frequently.
And, since this is CraveOnline’s anger-baiting series Trolling, it’s time to smear dirt all over this piece of crap. The Goonies, upon close examination, proves to be a shabby, weak, and even racist film that is perhaps all-too-colored by nostalgia goggles. I have heard people say that The Goonies is one of the best films of all time. We here at Trolling say this: The Goonies SUCKS! Let’s delve in and see why:
The film’s dirtiness does make it stand apart from some of its more squeaky-clean contemporaries, and I appreciate the high energy, fun characters, and raucous adventure, but The Goonies has an overall unsettling tone of sourness hanging over it. It’s a little bit mean. Like we’re watching an adventure that will turn these kids into bullies. Also, since the story is kind of dumb, it’s hard to take too seriously when you’re looking at it closely.
Until next week, let the hate mail flow.
Witney Seibold is the head film critic for Nerdist, and a contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
8 Reasons Why The Goonies SUCKS!
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Broad Characterizations
The Goonies falls into a classic trap of ensemble pieces: every character has only one character trait. Mikey is the group's leader. Chunk is a funny fat kid obsessed with food and cowardice. Data is a know-it-all. Mouth is a dickhead, etc. This is the simplest and, let's face it, most boring way to write an ensemble. None of the characters ever emerge past their one basic trait. They may mouth off like regular kids, but they're all pretty one-dimensional. They may be crass and funny, but they're hardly complex.
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The Kids are Bad Kids
Not that all kids in movies need to glowing moral examples, but it would be nice if the heroes of our story were, y'know, not horrible people. These kids are messy, destructive liars who only think to mock and hurt others. True, there are people who are out to harm them as well, but their hurtful shenanigans seem to surpass the playful level of Bugs Bunny or Harpo Marx, ever so slightly nudging into the world of actual cruelty. The kids are bullied and picked on, but they also bully and pick on others. Am I supposed to like them?
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Pirate Gold? Really?
This seems a little lame to me. A pirate ship? Pirate gold? This is tonally way, way out there. The beginning of the movie is about cutesy, mean-spirited suburban kids trying to outwit a family of evil criminals, right? Shouldn't their adventure lead them to a thematically appropriate place? Like a police station? Remember that scene in “Hamlet,” where Horatio reads a letter about how Hamlet escaped his assassins thanks to pirates? Sound like a lie to you? Yeah, the pirates in The Goonies feel like the screenwriter ran out of ideas and just decided to make Raiders of the Lost Ark instead. And Spielberg adored it, I'm sure.
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PG? Really?
How did so many kids see this film? Oh yeah, because it's rated PG. This was shortly after the inception of the PG-13 rating, and I'm surprised this film didn't earn the new restriction. It's got skeletons, a mutant monster, and a generally sour tone of death and danger. After Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (both rated PG, by the way), it was Spielberg himself who called for a rating in between PG and R. So he was pretty much inventing a rating almost specifically for this film. Which wasn't used. And now we have a kid film that, well, may not be appropriate for kids. Yeesh.
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“Goonies?” Really?
I've always been uncomfortable with the title. It sounds like a nickname for boogers. Is it meant to be short for “goons,” maybe? As in thugs? Are the kids aspiring thugs? If they are, their caustic behavior makes sense. But the word “Goonies” does not spring trippingly off the tongue. I know no actual kids who gave a nickname to their immediate circle of friends. If they were to, however, they would definitely choose a cooler name than “Goonies.” They would be “The Silver Awesomes,” or “The Explosionators” or some such thing.
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Asthma is Serious
One of the final scenes in the film depicts Mikey, an asthmatic, disposing of his inhaler. Asthma is a chronic illness that requires constant treatment. People have been hospitalized and even died from asthma attacks. An asthmatic child would not so fliply dispose of their own medicine. Imagine if a diabetic kid, as a gesture of defiance, threw away his insulin. Defiant, perhaps, but that kid will need medicine eventually. I guess shortly after the end of The Goonies, Mikey hyperventilated and died.
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Sloth is Awful
Sloth is a scary, gross monster, and is not amusing at all. I have heard people declare their fondness for characters like Mouth and Chunk (such flattering names!), but many have politely ignored the presence of Sloth, the mutated, TV-addict freak that the Fratellis keep in the basement. This is a character that would not be out of place in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, and his syphilitic smile, pin head, and gross eyeballs are enough to induce nightmares. Someone thought he would be a fun character to have in a kid film. He's not.
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Racist
So, yeah. Asians. They speak with funny pidgin accents and are good at gadgets. They also have funny last names like “Wang.” I suppose it was déclassé to mock black people in 1985, but evidently Asians were still fair game. Remember Long Duck Dong from Sixteen Candles? Or Toshiro from Revenge of the Nerds? Or Cadet Nogata from Police Academy 3? Or half the cast of Big Trouble in Little China? Or Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? Data is one of these. A broad Asian stereotype.
