The Goonies

Every man and his dog has been celebrating forty years of The Goonies this year, so let’s join in! Chasing trends is what the cool kids do!

It’s not a though virality as a form of short-lived popular obsession is a new phenomenon. Word of mouth has always been the most powerful way to build hype around a new product, even if it is as biddable as a herd of cats. It applies to any product, be that a movie or brand of cosmetics or fast food. Back in 1984, Ghostbusters exploded in the public consciousness as though precision-targeted and remained relevant for years. I recall having Ghostbusters-themed birthday parties multiple times. VHS made it easy.

A few years later, pre-teen boys like me gained a whole new obsession.

The Goonies had its release in 1985 and I know I didn’t see it at the cinema then. I was too young and the film outside of my awareness. It still broke through to my friends when it emerged on VHS in, I think, late 1986. Once my best friend Rossi rented it for his birthday, then I had to as well.

Quite why it had such a hold on us is hard to accurately measure or explain. Consider all of the things we had to occupy ourselves with – we had Top Trumps and made our own in homage. We had football stickers and briefly Garbage Pail Kid cards. We played British Bulldog in the school yard until the school cottoned on to this form of ball-less rugby and banned it. We played football on the field whenever we could. Everyone was obsessed with Star Wars and back then, in the mid-Eighties, we heard that George Lucas had planned for nine movies in the series. Every family had a Sinclair Spectrum of some kind and we shared our games on cassettes. Yet as much as we loved the movie, we never played at being the Goonies as we played at Star Wars. It wasn’t iconic enough for that.

It was much more adult a movie than our parents probably suspected. Ghostbusters is comparatively light-hearted, innocent and risk-free, Ray Stanz’s dream notwithstanding. There is something of the fantastic to Ghostbusters. It has particle beams and spooky ghosts and demon dogs and is relentlessly upbeat.

The Goonies was a film about children only a few years older than us, not adults. As a gang, they were relatable. Their wants, dilemmas and senses of humour were all things we could identify with. And beyond that, the film carried a sense of danger which few children’s films risk having. Dead bodies! A murderous gang of criminals! The ever-present risk of getting crushed by boulders or blasted apart by dynamite! Then, at the end of the adventure, the gang finds a pirate ship packed with skeletal corsairs and their treasure. High adventure on the high seas! The highest of peril! The highest of stakes! Children having an adventure where what they do actually matters! How could we fail to enjoy it?

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The Goonies tells the tale of the eponymous gang, who live in Goon Docks in Astoria, Oregon. Four boys: Mikey (key traits: naïve and asthmatic), Mouth (Spanish-speaking big mouth), Data (immigrant inventor genius) and Chunk (fat comic relief). Mikey and his brother Brand (the muscles) are on the eve of being forced out of their home by unscrupulous real estate developers when the rest of the gang come over to commiserate. Meanwhile, the Fratelli crime family are busy rampaging around the city.

The Goonies explore Mikey’s attic, where his historian father keeps assorted artifacts. They discover an ancient doubloon and an old treasure map once owned by infamous pirate One-Eyed Willy. The four of them decide that discovering the treasure would let them save their homes, and tie Brand up before heading off on one last adventure.

They follow the map to a disused restaurant on a headland, where they are joined by Brand and two of his female friends, Andy (ditzy and hot for Brand) and Stef (vocal tomboy). The Fratellis discover them there and force them to leave, but after Chunk locks himself in a freezer, the rest of the kids find a tunnel which leads to adventure!

When the Fratellis return, they lock Chunk up with the monstrous Sloth before going after the gang. Chunk shows kindness to Sloth who frees them both, and then they follow the rest into the tunnel after the treasure….

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The Goonies started life as a brainwave from Steven Spielberg. He wanted to know what kids might do on rainy days and dreamt up the story. But Spielberg was a busy man in the early Eighties and couldn’t get away from making E.T. and Temple of Doom and The Color Purple and producer roles on things like Gremlins and whatever he actually did on Poltergeist. He handed his notes to Chris Columbus (yes, Home Alone Chris Columbus) and picked Richard Donner (yes, Superman and Lethal Weapon’s Richard Donner) to direct it. The script was long, the shoot was longer, and what was the end result?

Forty years on, it brings me much sadness to report that, as an adult, The Goonies simply isn’t much cop.

It has nothing to do with the actors, all of whom are having a great time. The three actors playing the Fratellis (Robert Davi, Joe Pantoliano and Anne Ramsey) understood the brief perfectly. There’s no complexity to their characters – they’re villainous, squabbling cardboard cut-outs, as hapless as they are murderous. This motif of adult incompetence is ever-present. Mikey’s parents are played as clueless; the police as idiots.

The teenage characters aren’t much better served. Brand (no-shit Josh Brolin) is a lunk-head, Andy’s a panicky boy-mad airhead and Stef exists mostly as a snarky foil to Mouth But because everyone, again, has understood their role and knows they are supporting characters, they’re all committed and it works.

This leaves the film to be carried by the four Goonies themselves. Sean Astin, as Mikey, grew up in a household of actors. Corey Feldman, as Mouth, was a child actor of no little reputation. The children playing Data (future Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan) and Chunk (Jeff Cohen) were both completely new to motion pictures. The good news is that none of these four stagger under the narrative burden of the story, not even Cohen or Quan. Rewatching as an adult, I finally picked up on the repeated gag of Data’s bad pronunciation as a trait besides his tech wizardry. Quan may have been a newcomer, but it never shows, although his part doesn’t demand much depth from him.

The script does ask for much more from Sean Astin. Mikey is all misplaced enthusiasm, naivety and frustrated energy, held back by a hypochondriac mother. He’s the driving force behind the story since he’s the one who truly needs the legends to be true and the treasure to be real. He’s the one least resigned to his fate, who languishes in childish dreams of adventure and last-minute rescues, and the one most in need of both. He gets the ‘down here, it’s our time’ speech, the final moment of a child resisting the encroachment of adulthood and maturity. Perhaps only Astin could have played Mikey, as perhaps only Astin could have played Sam in Lord of the Rings. Young Astin does admirably as the story’s heart and conscience.

Yet the film hands the majority of the comic moments to Feldman and Cohen. The great thing about Feldman is his reliability as a child actor. He absolutely brought it in all of his most famous roles. Watch him in The Lost Boys or Stand By Me. You want a young actor to play a wild boy? You called on Corey Feldman, because he had access to his darker side. How many child-actors could be so convincing as the foul-mouthed prankster? But just as Astin gets his moment in the well, so does Feldman, and his is the more mature and cynical of the two. He wants to take his coins back in place of the wishes that never came true. Looking back, with knowledge of Feldman’s troubles, it gains an extra dimension, as though Feldman isn’t speaking as Mouth, but more as himself, and the moment is imbued with extra intensity.

I’ve left Cohen’s performance for last on purpose. Chunk was the only role he’s ever played on screen. One taste, it seems, was all he wanted and it’s a shame. Chunk is a spoiled child, more trusting and more immature than Mikey, but while Mikey is aware of the injustices of his life, Chunk blunders blindly through his and never stops talking. He gets his moment too, where he confesses all of his sins to the Fratellis, and I can’t quite tell how much of Robert Davi’s performance in the scene is acting and how much of it is his genuine in-the-moment response to Cohen. Cohen’s commitment to the bit is amazing, and I feel he could have had a good career if he’d wanted it.

Where the Goonies fails to entertain this adult is, tragically, at the plot level. The first half of the movie proceeds at a snail’s pace. It takes a long time for the gang to get into Willie’s maze of traps and longer still for the Fratellis to pursue them. There’s charm and humour to the proceedings, but minimal peril. Once we pass the mid-point, it picks up into the madcap adventure I loved as a child, but then it develops a different problem.

The Goonies is, on balance, rightly regarded as an Eighties children’s classic, but I now realize it was riffing on a Seventies classic. The Goonies is, in essence and execution, a live-action Scoobie Doo movie. I didn’t see it at the time, but now? Now it’s transparent. The action has a cartoonish quality to it, from the swarm of flappy rubber bats released from the well to the Hanna-Barbera sound effects caused by Data’s inventions. The Goonies would have kicked ass as an animated movie. Had they let Ralph Bakshi make it, it would have been an all-timer. This playfulness landed full-force as a child, but as an adult, it is wearying.

So the issue isn’t the film, which once it hits its stride is the unstoppable funhouse ride I remember it being. It’s more vulgar than I appreciated back then too. The issue is me. In growing up, in embracing the journey Mikey is afraid of, I have left behind dreams of treasure maps and adventures on BMXs. Children, though? Boys aged nine to eleven? Yep, it should still land just as Donner and Spielberg intended.