Viking Night: The Goonies
By Bruce Hall
August 6, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Actually when I put it that way, it sounds pretty appealing. But anyway yes, I had never seen The Goonies before now. This is despite my being a child of the ‘80s who (still) regularly drops lines from Ghostbusters into casual conversation. This is despite being a boy to whom driving a bullet-proof, crime-fighting Trans Am was a legitimate line of work to suggest to my career counselor. For a lot of people in my age group, The Goonies is a somewhat distant memory that nonetheless stirs up warm fuzzies when you mention it. I know grown men and women who walk around in T-shirts celebrating the Truffle Shuffle. So when I say I had somehow never seen The Goonies, I am aware it’s a bold statement.
Now that I’ve spent two paragraphs talking about what Goonies are NOT, I guess we should go ahead and get to the bottom of what a Goonie IS. Goonies are, in fact just kids. They’re all neighbors in the quaint seaside town of Astoria, Oregon. For reasons left unsaid, their subdivision is called the “Goon Docks.” There’s your title. The obvious leader of the group is Mikey (Sean Astin), a wise-past-his-years boy with an apparent preternatural knack for solving crimes. His friend Mouth (Corey Feldman) is the Joe Pesci of the group, and is also trying to bring back running your fingers through your hair as a debate tactic.
Data (Jonathan Ke Quan) is not an anatomically correct android from the future, but a delightful Vietnamese boy who invents unlikely things at convenient times. Write this down – The Goonies gets two stars right off the bat for being one of the few ‘80s comedies to feature an ethnic character and NOT exploiting them in any way. But I’m no hero. I’m not saying political incorrectness isn’t funny, I’m just saying it’s a pleasant surprise when films voluntarily take the high road. Now that I’ve said that, rounding out the group is Chunk (Jeff Cohen), who is the Token Fat Kid and is treated as such all through the film. So much for being progressive.
But I’m still not going to judge. It was a different time.
The lone auxiliary Goonie is Mikey’s big brother Brand (Josh Brolin), a loveable meathead who has since no doubt enjoyed a long career waxing other people’s cars for a living. He halfheartedly pushes the younger kids around but isn’t any smarter than they are, so he ends up socializing with them anyway. The gang is enjoying a final weekend together before the nefarious Astoria Country Club forecloses on their homes and levels the town. The Club evidently plans to build a private golf course on an expanse of terrain so lumpy it makes San Francisco look flat. But what screenwriter Chris Columbus lacks in the area of golf course design, he replaces with pretty solid storytelling instincts, at least if you’re young enough to identify with Mikey and his friends.
Despondent over their impending eviction, the kids head upstairs and start rummaging in the World’s Cleanest Attic, where they discover an old treasure map. There is a local legend about a pirate called One Eyed Willy (you read that right), who vanished somewhere along the coast, taking his Pirate Treasure with him. Remembering that any foreclosure can be stopped with a dump truck full of money, Mikey suggests they take the map, find the treasure and save their town. This makes perfect sense to everyone, because they are children in a movie produced by Steven Spielberg. So they embark on what is, intellectually speaking, a two hour Scooby-Doo episode. The “mystery” of One Eyed Willy becomes so easy for the kids to solve, it’s hard to believe it was still a mystery.
In fact, most of the detective work consists of Mikey literally pulling plot devices out of his back pocket whenever the plot bogs down for more than a few minutes - and it frequently does.
That’s okay, because The Goonies is clearly meant to appeal primarily to children. As I’ve said, Columbus’s screenplay more or less hits the notes you want in a kid-friendly adventure - although I’d argue the finished product is about a half hour too long. The film’s interminable midsection primarily involves wide eyed kids walking in circles, cheap scares, and painfully out of place Braveheart-style fatalism from Mikey whenever his friends lose faith. Still, the cast couldn’t be more ideal and the brain trust behind The Goonies clearly had a vision. Astin in particular already excels at the dogged, workmanlike self-determination that would later make him an excellent Hobbit. Jeff Cohen steals the show as Chunk, so I guess Hollywood is right - there IS an upside to making fun of fat kids after all!
Spielberg may or may not have directed parts the film himself (as with Poltergeist, there is some measure of debate on this) but either way, his cloying whimsy permeates the production, and actual director Richard Donner’s legendary pragmatism pulls solid performances out of the cast and keeps the narrative ball rolling - except when it doesn’t. I’m not sure if you’d recognize David Grusin’s work anywhere else, but his soundtrack is almost as (mostly) entertaining as (parts of) the film itself. The Goonies universe is a cartoonish, uneven place that’s mostly good fun but on the whole, I’m not sure it quite lives up to its reputation. The overlong and hyper-simplistic story may or may not work for you as an adult, but the kid inside is bound to have a good time - despite the total lack of axe murderers and face hugging xenomorphs.