Johnny Be Good
By Peter Johnny Gardner
One of the pivotal films of my teenage years was The Breakfast Club, the iconic 80s time capsule of high school stereotypes bonding during a Saturday of detention. I must have seen it dozens of times, and my friends and I would frequently act out scenes from the film to amuse ourselves and try to figure out which stereotype other people we knew would be classified as. I think it was decided that I'm somewhere in between the nerd and the troublemaker.
Skip ahead a few years, and Johnny Be Good came along to mindfuck everyone who had started typecasting the actors from The Breakfast Club. Fans of The Breakfast Club, imagine watching a movie where Anthony Michael Hall is playing the arrogant jock and the principal is playing a coach. First off, there is little depth to Hall's Johnny, so throughout the entire 90 minutes of this movie, one could give a flying fucking rat's ass whether or not this asshole decides to give into the temptation being offered by rival colleges as they compete to get Johnny, all-star high school football player, to be on their team. They do so by offering money, drugs, and prostitutes. I should've played more sports in school. It would've made getting into college much more fun. The film's title wonders if Johnny will be good and avoid the temptation while I wonder who thought that would be a clever title and if they are still working in Hollywood today.
Along for the ride is Robert Downey Jr once again playing the eccentric friend. I wonder how much of Downey himself he brought to his role because a lot of his behavior and rants throughout the film mirror the way you see him in interviews and other movies? His character doesn't advance the plot at all and only serves as comic relief in a movie that's filled with enough weird moments to the point where I found myself saying, "Wha...?" instead of laughing. Two examples: in order to let Johnny visit his teenage daughter (Uma!), the girl's father, a sheriff, orders Johnny and Downey to play a game of football on the front lawn of his house with a handcuffed convict. Ok. Also, when Johnny and Downey find out that Coach Dick has been pushing Johnny toward a particular school because of a lucrative coaching contract, the two friends decide to get him back by ordering a bunch of pizzas to his house (believable) and hiring trapeze artists and a fucking elephant to come marching onto his front lawn (Wha...?).
I guess this is the first turkey I've run across in Downey's filmography because there's no other reason to watch this movie other than to see Downey be weird and Uma Thurman in skintight, flesh colored pajamas. All this film did for me was remind me how much it used to irk me that football players would get cushy scholarships into universities despite their lack of useful intellect while the rest of us had to bust ass in school, score high on standardized tests, and write silly letters to schools explaining why they should accept us. It's not fair that someone should get into a better school than me based on their athletic skill instead of their mind.
