The Goonies is an entire generation's favourite film. Shame it's not very good

Telegraph

2 days ago

When I started at university more years ago than I care to remember, one of the time-honoured ways of breaking the ice, after comparing what A-levels you'd done and where you'd been on your gap year, was discussing the films that you'd grown up watching as a child. For my generation, this meant pictures released largely in the Eighties and the early Nineties.
Sometimes these were age-appropriate – Star Wars and Indiana Jones and the like – and sometimes they were not. (I was astonished at how many people had seen Halloween and Nightmare On Elm Street at very young and impressionable ages.) Yet one picture, above all, stood out. Everyone had seen – and apparently loved – The Goonies.
When the Richard Donner -directed family adventure film was first released 40 years ago, it came out to an appropriate amount of hype and expectation. Although Donner was a well-regarded journeyman director who was best known for making the first Superman film – which is amusingly homaged in one scene – and would go on to be responsible for all the Lethal Weapon films, it was mainly promoted, and regarded, as a Steven Spielberg film.
Although Spielberg is only credited as executive producer and originator of the film's story, his fingerprints are all over the finished picture and so many have considered it (along with Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist) an honorary entry into that director's distinguished canon.
It was a decent box office hit on release, grossing $125 million on a budget of $19 million. Granted, this was not nearly as much as the other Spielberg-produced blockbusters of the decade – Gremlins made $213 million, Back To The Future a staggering $389 million – but it was intended predominantly as a children's film and promoted and marketed as such.
It had no well-known actors in it – although several of the young cast would go on to become stars, including Josh Brolin and Sean Astin – and was not based on an existing book or television series, nor was it a sequel to anything else. Reviews were kind but hardly laudatory, and under normal circumstances it would have been fondly regarded but something of an also-ran.
Instead, The Goonies has continued to lead an ongoing existence as one of the most beloved films of its decade, if not all time. A 2009 poll suggested that it was the Eighties picture that most fans wanted to see remade (followed by Labyrinth and Top Gun), and in 2017, it enjoyed the honour of being selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry as 'culturally, aesthetically or historically significant.'
It has had numerous pop culture allusions – most recently in Deadpool 2, when the antagonist Cable (played by Goonies star Josh Brolin) is sardonically referred to as 'One-Eyed Willie', the name of the legendary pirate from the picture – and the band the Fratellis named themselves after the film's bumbling villains. In February this year, after years of speculation, a sequel was announced, to be scripted by Potsy Ponciroli and produced by Steven Spielberg once again. One of its stars, Corey Feldman, recently commented: 'All I can say is, get us all together. Everybody is looking good. Sean's looking good. Josh is looking good. We're all looking good still, and we're all alive. Goonies never say die…There's hope.'
But The Goonies has already been remade, really, in the form of the JJ Abrams film Super 8, the Netflix hit Stranger Things, or the recent Star Wars series Skeleton Crew, which sent four tykes across the galaxy in search of adventure.
It is, in other words, an acknowledged and much-loved classic of cinema. So why, then, did a recent rewatch of The Goonies, to mark its 40th anniversary, leave me feeling not so much disappointed as indifferent, and bemused by the adulation that it continues to receive?
There's nothing wrong with the picture as such, bar a mediocre sound design that means that it's often impossible to hear the dialogue of the various children shouting at one another. But it's also merely a serviceable, unchallenging piece of entertainment that seems bland and uninspired when compared to the other Spielberg-produced pictures from the same period. It nods towards the tedium of suburban life and how its youthful denizens look for adventure, but then does little with its own concept.
It is not hard to see why it became a cult picture for audiences that grew up on it at an impressionable age, and hope that their own children would thrill to it, too. But in an era where we have far more sophisticated family viewing – The Wild Robot, Paddington 2 and Wonka, to name but three, come to mind – it may be time to accept that the nostalgic love that many bear for The Goonies is not based on any especial merits that the film has, but for their own childhood.
And this is where a rather wider issue comes to hand. There are many films from the Eighties which have acquired a dubious degree of nostalgic affection over the past few decades despite not being very good. Sometimes, there is an ill-fated attempt to embrace this by remaking them; for instance, the dreadful 1984 Commies-invade-America action film Red Dawn was turned into an equally dreadful 2012 picture, proving that it was a poor idea in the first and second place alike.
On other occasions, you have insanely belated sequels that manage to jettison most of what was charming or interesting about the picture in the first place. Beverly Hills Cop took cinema by storm when it came out in 1984 and made a fortune. By the time that the fourth in the series, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, was released last year, the kind of teenagers who had thrilled to the exploits of Eddie Murphy in the first picture would now be in their mid-50s, if not older.
Sometimes, Eighties pictures are simply terrible, and have been misremembered as being better than they are because of the kind of tiresomely ironic nostalgia that sees people turn up at cinemas to shout out dialogue from mediocre movies while dressed up as the characters. Revisiting St Elmo's Fire recently, I realised that a dreadful, self-important and navel-gazing picture has been given undue attention partly because of a cast who (in some cases, at least) went onto better and greater things, but partly also because someone, somewhere decided that the film was worthy of memorialising with a high-profile documentary about its actors. It does not make the original film better, but what it does is to continue its prominence in popular culture.
Actors are as prone to this kind of false memory syndrome as fans, too. When the Tom Cruise racing drama Days of Thunder came out in 1990, it was swiftly (and rightly) dismissed as a failed attempt to remake Top Gun with fast cars. Now, however, Cruise has decided that, rather than a boring and overwrought piece of flash, the picture is an underrated masterpiece that merits its own sequel, three and a half decades later. He is wrong, but like many of his other pictures from this period, there is a yawning gulf between the quality of the original film and the false memory that its admirers have of it. (What next, Far and Away 2?)
There are genuinely great films from the Eighties and early Nineties that heartily deserve their cult status, and stand up extremely well today, from the Indiana Jones films and Back to the Future to Blade Runner and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. All of these are eminently rewatchable and worthy of all the plaudits that they have received, and continue to receive, because of their wit, originality and chutzpah.
Yet even here, there has been an unwelcome tendency to besmirch the legacy – there was absolutely no need for the dire, Spielberg-less Dial of Destiny ever to exist – and persistent rumours about forthcoming remakes, spin-offs and the like just show what a dire state contemporary Hollywood is in when it comes to intellectual property.
If and when The Goonies gets a sequel, no doubt it will send a whole new generation back to the original. They may well be underwhelmed by it. But this will not stop the first tranche of its fans believing – despite the obvious evidence to the contrary – that it is a great picture. For them, that is all that matters. As Thomas Wolfe so famously wrote, 'you can never go home again'. Perhaps rewatching this silly, loud and endearingly goofy film is as close as many of its fans will ever get to going home once more themselves.