Tag Archives: Emilio Estevez

Rated X (2000, directed by Emilio Estevez)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In Rated X, two real-life brothers play another set of real-life brothers.

Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen play, respectively, brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell.  Two pot-smoking entrepreneurs who found fame and fortune during the so-called Golden Age of Pornography (Behind the Green Door was their most famous film), Jim and Artie owned the O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco and became famous for their numerous legal troubles and their advocacy for freedom of speech.  While Jim became a semi-respectable figure who hobnobbed with the city’s elite, Artie became known for his consumption of cocaine.  In 1991, Jim drove over to Artie’s house and shot him twice.  Jim, who claimed Artie had threatened to kill him, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison.  Jim was released after serving three years.  (He died in 2007, long after this film aired on Showtime.)

Rated X tells the story of the Mitchell Brothers in a flat and perfunctory manner.  Emilio Estevez not only plays Jim but he also directs.  He doesn’t bring much visual style or storytelling style to the film, despite a few scenes that appear to have been cribbed from Boogie Nights.  Estevez doesn’t seem to be sure what he wants to say about the Mitchell Brothers and they come across as being the most boring pornographers in history.  What’s really strange is that Estevez and Sheen are not believable as brothers, despite both wearing matching bald caps.  There’s nothing about their performances that would lead you to believe that they grew up with each other.  Casting Sheen as an out-of-control drug addict seems like a no-brainer but he’s not even believable when he’s snorting coke and handing out cheerleader uniforms.  In fact, the film probably would have worked better if Sheen and Estevez had switched roles.  Estevez was always better at showing emotion than Charlie.  In Rated X, Jim is always intense while Artie always has the wide-eyed stare that Oliver Stone made such good use of in Platoon.

I can understand the casting, though.  Jim and Artie were brothers so it makes sense to cast brothers to play them.  Because Charlie has always been best-known for his flamboyant life off-screen, it probably seemed to the obvious decision to cast him as the wild brother while Estevez, who has always come across as being a stable guy offscreen, seemed right for Jim.  But onscreen, Estevez is always better as an unpredictable outlaw and Charlie is always better as someone who tries to keep his real emotions bottled up.  This film was cast based on Estevez and Sheen’s off-camera personas and they’re both miscast as a result.

There’s an interesting movie to be made about the Mitchells.  Their rise and fall mirrored the rise and fall of the 6os counterculture.  (A year before he killed his brother, Jim even tried to launch a Ramparts-style magazine for the 90s.)  Unfortunately, the Showtime-produced Rated X is not it.

#MondayMuggers presents YOUNG GUNS (1988) starring Emilio Etevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Charlie Sheen!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. Tonight, Monday May 19th, we are showing YOUNG GUNS (1988) starring Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, Dermot Mulroney, Casey Siemaszko, Terence Stamp, Jack Palance, Terry O’Quinn, Brian Keith, and Patrick Wayne.

This movie focuses on a group of young gunmen, led by Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez), who become deputies to avenge the murder of John Tunstall (Terence Stamp), the rancher who took them in, gave them jobs, and taught them how to read. But when Billy takes their authority too far, they soon find themselves to be the outlaws and the ones being hunted down.

Join us tonight for #MondayMuggers and watch the extremely fun YOUNG GUNS! It’s on Amazon Prime. The trailer is included below:

STAKEOUT (1987) – Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez stakeout the beautiful Madeline Stowe!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

What were those years in your life where movies really became something special to you? I’d say mine began in around 1984 and extended all the way through about 1991, when I headed off to college and the realities of the world started kicking in. Our family got our first VCR around 1984, and this is when I first truly began to fall in love with the cinema. These are the years when I would spend every moment I could in our local video stores inspecting every film in their stock. So many of my favorite movies came out during this time and hold a sense of nostalgic value in my life even now. One of those movies is STAKEOUT, an action comedy from 1987 starring Richard Dreyfuss and Emilo Estevez. 

STAKEOUT begins with Richard “Stick” Montgomery (Aidan Quinn) escaping from prison, where he has been sent for killing an FBI agent a year earlier. Enter Seattle police detectives Chris Lecce (Richard Dreyfuss) and Bill Reimers (Emilio Estevez). They are assigned to stakeout the home of Montgomery’s beautiful ex-girlfriend Maria (Madeleine Stowe). In order to listen to her phone conversations, Chris impersonates a telephone repairman and meets her when he goes into her home to install the “bugs.” As fate would have it, he runs into Maria again at the local grocery store when he’s gone out to buy some supplies and donuts. She asks him to give her a ride home when she discovers she has a flat tire on her bike. He reluctantly gives her a ride home, but once he’s there, he puts up her groceries, she makes him a spicy dinner, and then he not so reluctantly makes love to her… all while his partner Bill is across the street waiting for his donuts. As you might imagine, this complicates the entire situation. And meanwhile, “Stick” Montgomery keeps making his way Seattle and Maria’s house where he stashed his cash before going away to prison.

STAKEOUT is one of those movies that our family rented in the late ‘80’s, and I immediately fell in love with. It’s my favorite kind of movie, the buddy cop film. Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez have a really nice chemistry together, and they come across as old friends. Even though there’s quite a bit of violence, the movie has a playful streak that I enjoy. There’s a series of running gags where Chris and Bill play practical jokes back and forth with the cops who relieve them on the stakeout each day, played by Dan Lauria and Forest Whitaker. The movie even throws in a little self-referential humor. In order to relieve the boredom of the stakeout, Estevez’ character is asking Dreyfuss movie trivia questions. He asks him to identify the movie where the line “this is no boating accident!” is from! Dreyfuss’ character has no idea. These are fun moments for me.

Another thing I love about STAKEOUT is the presence of the gorgeous Madeleine Stowe, who was making her first major film appearance. Seeing the film for the first time as a teenager of 14 years old made me a fan of hers for life. I’m not saying the movie was made specifically for 14-year-old boys, but it certainly wasn’t trying to push us away with its ad campaign that prominently featured the lovely Ms. Stowe. I’ll also point out that Aidan Quinn is effective and intimidating as the escaped murderer Richard “Stick” Montgomery. The fact that his character really does seem dangerous helps to make the film even more exciting when everything finally comes to a head. Veteran Director John Badham has made some really good movies in his career, including SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), BLUE THUNDER (1983), THE HARD WAY (1991), and NICK OF TIME (1995), to name a few. He knows what he’s doing, and I really started following his work based on how much I enjoyed STAKEOUT.

As much as I enjoy STAKEOUT, it’s one of those movies I don’t hear that much about these days even though it was a substantial box office hit. There was a misguided sequel made in 1993, ANOTHER STAKEOUT, that brought back Dreyfus, Estevez, and director Badham. I remember watching the sequel in the 90’s, but I honestly don’t remember anything about it. One of the reasons I enjoy writing about movies is because it gives me an opportunity to share a part of who I am, the things I enjoy, and maybe even serve as a reminder to others of films like STAKEOUT. I don’t think of these movies often myself, but when I was looking at my DVD collection earlier today, I smiled when I saw it and happily pulled it off the shelf to watch it again for the first time in several years!

I’ve included the trailer below:

Documentary Review: Brats (dir by Andrew McCarthy)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The documentary Brats opens with actor and travel writer Andrew McCarthy in New York City.

He’s obsessing over his film career, which featured him starring in several classic 80s films, like Pretty In Pink, Class, and Less Than Zero.  If you love those films as much as I do, you’ll be happy to know that, physically, McCarthy has aged well.  If he was adorably cute during his teen idol days, Andrew McCarthy now looks like a distinguished and handsome creative writing teacher.  McCarthy talks about how he was briefly a star and now, he has a busy career as a writer.  To be honest, it seems like everything should be going pretty well for Andrew McCarthy.

The only problem is that Andrew McCarthy has spent the last 30 years obsessed with an article that he feels led to him being labeled as one of the “Brat Pack,” along with Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, and Ally Sheedy.  Interestingly enough, McCarthy is only mentioned once in the article, when Nelson dismissively describes him as playing every role “with the same intensity.”  Still, McCarthy feels that the article led to him being unfairly labeled “a brat,” and it also led to his film career fizzling.

Over the course of the documentary, McCarthy travels to California and tracks down some of his co-stars (with both Ringwald and Nelson being notable for their absence) and he also talks to the author of the article.  He talks about what it means to be identified with the Brat Pack and how the label still haunts him.

Seriously, this is one of the most depressing documentaries I’ve ever seen.

It’s not just that McCarthy, who really does seem like he should be enjoying his second act as a successful and respected travel writer, is still obsessed with an article that came out 30 years ago.  It’s also the fact that, judging from the scenes in which he drops in on Estevez, Lowe, Moore, and Sheedy, it doesn’t appear that anyone has wanted to talk to McCarthy since they all did St. Elmo’s Fire.  Emilio Estevez, especially, seems to be uncomfortable with having McCarthy in his kitchen.  As for the others, Ally Sheedy is polite, Demi Moore comes across as if she’s visiting from another planet, and Rob Lowe is once again the most likable and laid back person in the room.  Everyone that McCarthy interviews has dealt with the Brat Pack legacy in their own different way.  The thing they all have in common is that they’ve all dealt with it better than McCarthy.

The saddest part of the film is that Molly Ringwald never returns Andrew McCarthy’s call.  Seriously, the main reason I watched this documentary was because I wanted to see Andie and Blane reunited.  Instead, I had to settle for Blane and Duckie having an awkward conversation.  It’s nice to see that McCarthy and Jon Cryer are apparently now on friendly terms (which apparently they weren’t during the filming of Pretty in Pink), but seriously, Molly is the one that most viewers will probably want to see reunited with Andrew.  That it doesn’t happen is kind of heart-breaking.

I hope someone gives Andrew McCarthy a good hug and tells him that we’re all Team Blane.  He deserves it.

In The Custody of Strangers (1982, directed by Robert Greenwald)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In this television film, Emilio Estevez plays the world’s worst son but his behavior makes sense because he also has the world’s worst father (played by Estevez’s real-life father, Martin Sheen).

When teenager Danny Caldwell (Estevez) gets arrested for crashing into a police car while driving drunk, his mother, Sandy (Jane Alexander), wants to bail him out and bring him home.  However, Frank Caldwell (Sheen) is an old-fashioned disciplinarian and he decides that his son needs to spend a night in jail in order to teach him a lesson.  Even though, as a juvenile, Danny is given a private cell, he still snaps when the older inmate in the cell next door starts coming onto him.  After smashing the man’s head against the cell bars, Danny picks up a battery charge and is sucked into the system.

While Frank and Sandy struggle to get Danny released from jail, Danny falls deeper and deeper into despair and anger.  It’s an overcrowded, busy jail and Danny is often left in isolation for both his safety and the safety of the other prisoners.  Even though the warden (Kenneth McMillan) is sympathetic to Danny and can tell that he’s not really a hardened criminal, there’s only so much that he can do for him.  Meanwhile, on the outside world, Frank stubbornly refuses to admit that he made a mistake by leaving Danny in jail overnight.  When a job opportunity presents itself in another state, the unemployed Frank misses some of Danny’s hearings so that he can interview for it, leaving Danny feeling abandoned all over again.

For obvious reasons, the casting of Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez as father and son works very well in this film.  Not only is there the obvious family resemblance but both Sheen and Estevez project the same attitude of anger and resentment towards the world.  If Danny has a chip on his shoulder, it’s because he inherited from his father.  In The Custody of Strangers does a good job of showing how being imprisoned can often turn someone who made a mistake into a hardened criminal but, even though it’s mostly critical of the criminal justice system, it doesn’t let Frank off the hook either.  Frank may say that he was just trying to discipline his son but the film makes clear that what he actually wanted was for jail to do his job as a parent.  The results are disastrous and the film ends on a note of ambiguity.  After what Danny has been through, it’s clear that he’ll never be the same person again.

Sheen, Alexander, and Estevez all give good performances in In The Custody of Strangers.  The only ray of hope that the film offers is the kindly warden and he’s also the film’s biggest flaw because it’s hard to believe that, with everything else going on in the jail, he would have had time to take such a benevolent interest in just one inmate.  In real life, Danny Caldwell would have been even more lost than in this movie.

Cleaning Out The DVR: Widsom (dir by Emilio Estevez)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(I recorded the 1986 film, Wisdom, off of Retroplex on Mary 1st.)

 

(SPOILER ALERT!  The ending of this film is so extremely stupid that there’s no way I’m not going to discuss it in this review.)

Meet John Wisdom (Emilio Estevez)!

He’s got one of those ironic names, as people in pretentious movies often do.  He’s extremely naive but his name is Wisdom.  He does a lot of stupid crap but his name is Wisdom.  And I guess the audience is meant to feel that Wisdom understands more than even he knows.

Or something like that.

Who knows?

Anyway, John Wisdom has got some issues.  He’s a college dropout who can’t get a good job because he has a criminal record.  He didn’t really do anything wrong, of course.  All he did was steal a car on the night of his high school graduation.  Hey, who hasn’t done that?  Anyway, Wisdom would be happy to just spend all day sitting around in his bathtub but his father (Tom Skerritt) insists that Wisdom find some sort of employment.

Eventually, Wisdom ends up working in a fast food restaurant.  It turns out that he’s not very good at it, which leads me to suspect that Wisdom probably wouldn’t be very good at any of the other jobs that he was pursuing either.  To be honest, the main reason that Wisdom works at the restaurant is so that Charlie Sheen can have a cameo as Wisdom’s boss.

(Strangely, Martin Sheen is nowhere to be found in the movie.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Emilio Estevez — who both directed and wrote the script — originally envisioned Martin playing his father.  Tom Skerritt does an extended Martin Sheen impersonation as Daddy Wisdom.)

Anyway, Wisdom decides that since the system refuses to give him a fair chance, he’s going to live the rest of his life as an outlaw.  So, Wisdom starts to rob banks.  However, instead of stealing all of the money, Wisdom is more interested in setting fire to mortgage and loan records.  Wisdom explains, via voice over, that he’s concerned about the working people who keeps getting screwed over by the banks.  That’s all good and well but I thought the whole reason that Wisdom started robbing banks was because there was no other way for him to make any money.  So, when did Wisdom go from being a greedy criminal to an altruistic rebel?

Naturally, Wisdom and his girlfriend, Karen (Demi Moore), becomes folk heroes.  Everyone wants to meet Wisdom and protect him from the police.  But eventually, Karen gets gunned down by a police helicopter.  Poor Karen.  She didn’t even want to rob banks.  Well, actually, she did want to rob banks.  And then she didn’t.  And then she did again.  Karen’s motivation and personality changes from scene-to-scene, largely because she’s a poorly written character.  But no matter.  She’s dead now.

But Wisdom’s still alive!  Except, soon, he finds himself surrounded by cops.  Standing in the middle of a football field (Oh my God!  The symbolism!), Wisdom is gunned down by law enforcement…

…except suddenly, Wisdom’s back in the bathtub.  Apparently, he was just daydreaming about his girlfriend getting gunned down in front of him.  Wait … what?  Seriously, what type of ending is that!?  At the very least, the film could have ended with Wisdom robbing a bank for real and accepting that his dream is destined to come true.  I mean, that would have been stupid but at least it would have been something.  Instead, things end with Wisdom leaving the bathroom.

So, basically, the entire film was just Wisdom daydreaming about robbing banks and eventually getting gunned down on a football field.  Oh, Wisdom.  You got some issues, sweetie!

Emilio Estevez directed this film a year after appearing in The Breakfast Club.  Like many directorial debuts, it’s incredibly dumb.  You can tell that Estevez wasn’t sure what he wanted to say but he was still damn determined to say it.  Why do so many actors end up directing such pretentious and/or boring movies?  On the plus side, there were a few attempts at deliberate humor (Wisdom is not a particularly organized bank robber) and Demi Moore did a fairly good job playing an inconsistent character.  Otherwise, Wisdom is mostly memorable for having one of the worst endings of all time.

A Movie A Day #318: The War At Home (1996, directed by Emilio Estevez)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1972 and it is Thanksgiving week in small town America.  The Colliers are getting ready for the holidays.  Maurine (Kathy Bates) is intent on preparing the perfect Thanksgiving meal.  Bob (Martin Sheen) is keeping an eye on his car dealership and wondering why kids today are not as respectful as they once were.  The two Collier children are coming home from school.  The youngest, Karen (Kimberly Williams), is hoping she can keep the peace because she knows that her older brother, Jeremy (Emilio Estevez), has returned from Vietnam a changed man.  Suffering from severe PTSD, Jeremy is haunted by flashbacks and angry at everything, especially his father.  The only reason he even attended college was so he could be near his girlfriend (Carla Gugino) and even she has told him that she no longer feels comfortable around him.  When Jeremy returns home, his family first tries to ignore the problems that he’s having adjusting to civilian life but Jeremy is determined not to be ignored.

Emilio Estevez famously agreed to appear, for free, in the third Mighty Ducks films in return for Disney agreeing to produce and distribute The War At Home.  Unfortunately, this heartfelt movie has never gotten the attention that it deserves.  While Estevez’s direction is never subtle and the script , which was based on a play, is often heavy-handed, The War At Home is redeemed by the powerful performances of Estevez, Bates, Sheen, and Williams.  Bates is especially good as the perfect homemaker who is revealed to be smarter than anyone realized.  The War At Home is a good but overlooked film that is still relevant today.

A Movie A Day #231: Judgment Night (1993, directed by Stephen Hopkins)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Four suburbanites (Emilio Estevez, Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) are driving to a boxing match in pricey RV when Piven takes a wrong turn and they end up lost in the wrong side of the city.  Not only are they lost but they also witness Fallon (Denis Leary) and his gang murdering a young man.  Jeremy Piven thinks that he can negotiate with Fallon and get his friends out of the situation by pulling out his wallet and flashing a few bills.  Guess how well that works out for them?  With Fallon chasing them through the city, these formerly smug and complacent yuppies are forced into a battle for survival.

Judgment Night is a deeply stupid but compulsively watchable movie.  From the minute that Piven shows up with that RV and Estevez says goodbye to his wife and newborn child, it is obvious what’s going to happen.  Fortunately, the cast is better than average and Stephen Hopkins does a good job of making the city look menacing and keeping up the pace.  There are a few times that Judgment Night pretends like it has something to say about wealth and society but it never tries too hard to be anything more than an exciting B-movie.  Though it may not have been hard to do considering that his main competition was Emilio Estevez, Denis Leary easily dominates Judgment Night.  Fallon may be a cartoon villain but Judgment Night is a cartoonish movie so it works.

Today, Judgment Night is best remembered for its soundtrack, on which nearly every song was a collaboration between hip hop and metal artists.  The Judgment Night soundtrack may not have invented the genre of rap rock but it was many people’s first exposure to it.  The Teenage Fan Club/De La Soul collaboration Fallin‘ opens the movie on just the right note while Biohazard and Onyx’s Judgment Night is such a strong track that there’s no way the rest of the movie can hope to live up to it.

Judgment Night.  The movie is ok.  The soundtrack is fucking amazing.

Icarus File No. 2: Maximum Overdrive (dir by Steven King)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

mo

There is exactly one effective sequence to be found in Maximum Overdrive, a horror film from 1986 that attempts to show us what would happen if all of Earth’s machines decided to destroy humanity.

It takes place at the end of a little league game.  The coach, happy that his team has won, declares soda for everyone!  He walks over to the soft drink machine and puts in his coins and…nothing happens.  The coach stares at the machine perplexed.  His team gathers around him.

Suddenly, a can flies out of the machine and hits the coach in the groin.  Coach falls to his knees, just to get another can driven straight into his skull, leaving him with a big bloody hole in his head.  As the coach twitches, his teams starts to run away.  Suddenly, the machine is shooting cans out at them.  Some of the kids escape but quite a few don’t.

Suddenly, as the kids flee, a driverless steamroller crashes through a fence and drives across the field, graphically flattening one of the players…

It’s over-the-top, it’s kind of scary, it’s fun in a naughty sort of way, and it’s exciting to watch.  It’s totally absurd and yet it’s effective at the same time.  It’s a really brilliant scene, one that hints at what Maximum Overdrive could have been.  It hints that Maximum Overdrive‘s first-time director did have some potential and watching it, one is tempted to feel a pang of regret over the fact that he never directed another film after this one.

However, then you watch the rest of Maximum Overdrive and you realize that one effective scene was a total fluke.  To your horror, you realize that this film’s director (and screenwriter) has decided to set nearly the entire film in the ugliest and most disgusting truck stop in the world.  You realize that the director has no idea how to maintain suspense and that his idea of horror appears to be having a lot of trucks constantly circling the truck stop.  And then, worst of all, you realize that the unlikable caricatures inside the truck stop are meant to be our heroes!

And you find yourself wondering if things could possibly get any worse.  Well, believe me — they can.

First off, a guy named Camp Loman (Christopher Murney) shows up and reveals himself to be a total lech and then starts trying to sell bibles and really, what do you expect from someone named Camp Loman?  And, what’s annoying, is that the film’s director seems to think that he’s blowing our mind by presenting us with an hypocritical bible salesman.  I mean, seriously — the amount of time devoted to Camp Loman will make you nostalgic for scenes of a steamroller crushing a child.

And then Emilio Estevez shows up as our hero but he scowls through the entire movie and delivers all of his lines through gritted teeth, as if he’s pissed off about appearing in Maximum Overdrive and really, who can blame him?  That said, it doesn’t really make for an enjoyable performance.

But hey — Emilio’s not the only person in the truck stop.  There’s also Pat Hingle, playing the owner of the truck stop.  He’s overweight, wears a tie, smokes a cigar, and speaks with a vaguely Southern accent.  Hmmmmm, do you think he’s going to be a bad guy?

Oh!  And let’s not forget the waitress played by Ellen McElduff.  “WE MADE YOU!” she shouts at the machines and then she shouts it again and again and again and again and it’s almost as if the film is being directed by a guy so in love with his own dialogue that he doesn’t realize how annoying the same line gets when it’s screeched over and over again.

And I haven’t even gotten to the helium-voiced newlyweds yet…

When I recently watched Maximum Overdrive on Encore, there were a lot of things that annoyed me, such as the bad pacing, the bad acting, the bad dialogue, the bad special effects, the bad cinematography, and the bad everything else.  But what really got to me was just how inconsistent this movie was.  Some machines turned into killers but oddly, others did not.  At one point, a machine gun starts shooting at the people in the truck stop but the weapons that Pat Hingle keeps in the truck stop never turn on their human masters.  Seriously, if you’re going to make a terrible movie, at least be consistent.

So, you may be asking, why is this an Icarus File?  Well, it was directed by Stephen King, the writer who is routinely called the “master of horror.”  King may be a great writer but, judging from this movie, he was a really crappy director.  I imagine, when the film was in pre-production, the logic was that if King could write a scary book then he could definitely direct a scary movie.

Nope.

It turns out that, just as Icarus should never have gotten so close to the sun, Stephen King should never have directed a movie.

Previous Icarus Files:

  1. Cloud Atlas

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #73: St. Elmo’s Fire (dir by Joel Schumacher)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

St_elmo's_fire

Oh my God!  Aren’t rich, white people just like the worst!?

Actually, usually I would never say something like that.  I usually find class warfare to be tedious and I personally think poor people can be just as annoying as rich people.  I had no interest in the whole Occupy Wall Street thing and I once referred to V For Vendetta as being V For Vapid.

No, I may not be much of a class warrior but then again, that may be because I never met any of the characters at the center of the 1985 film St. Elmo’s Fire.  Seriously, if anything could turn me into a slogan-spouting, window-smashing revolutionary, it would be having to deal with any of the self-centered, entitled characters in St. Elmo’s Fire.

St. Elmo’s Fire is about a group of seven friends, three of whom are played by actors who co-starred in The Breakfast Club.  These friends all met at and are recent graduates from Georgetown University.  St. Elmo’s Fire follows them as they laugh, love, drink, do drugs, and try to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

For instance, there’s Billy (Rob Lowe), who has big hair and wears one dangling earring.  Billy was in a fraternity and spends most of the movie wishing that he still was.  Billy also plays the saxophone and he has a wife and a kid who he has pretty much abandoned … well, you know what?  I like Rob Lowe.  He seems like a fun guy and his DirectTV commercials were all classics but oh my God, does he ever give a bad performance in St. Elmo’s Fire.  Some of it is because Billy is not a very likable character.  He’s supposed to be the rough-around-the-edges, secretly sensitive rebel type but ultimately, he just comes across as being a loser.

And then there’s Jules (Demi Moore), who does too much cocaine and, as a result, finds herself fearing that she’s on the verge of being sold into a sexual slavery.  Jules doesn’t get to do much other than be rescued by the other characters.  Fortunately, when it looks like the group is drifting apart, Jules attempts to commit suicide and brings everyone back together.  Way to be a plot device, Jules!

Wendy (Mare Winningham) is the sweet but insecure virgin who has a crush on Billy.  Wendy works as a social worker and ends up getting insulted by the very people that she’s trying to help.  Winningham gives one of the film’s better performances but you can’t help but feel that Wendy deserves better friends.

Speaking of good performances, Andrew McCarthy also gives a pretty good one.  McCarthy plays Kevin Dolenz, the idealistic writer who everyone is convinced is gay because he hasn’t had sex in 2 years.  However, Kevin is actually in love with his best friend’s girlfriend.  As written, Kevin runs the risk of coming across as being insufferably moralistic but McCarthy gives a likable performance.  He turns Kevin into the nice guy that we all want to know.

And then there’s the Breakfast Club alumni.

Alec Newberry (Judd Nelson) was the vice-president of the Georgetown Democrats but now, because it pays better, he’s taken a job working for a Republican senator.  Alec’s girlfriend is Leslie (Ally Sheedy).  Alec obsessively cheats on Leslie, claiming that he can’t be loyal to her unless she’s willing to marry him.  The group of friends is largely centered around Alec and Leslie though it’s never really clear why.  Alec and Leslie are boring characters and, as a result, they’re a boring couple.

And then there’s Kirby (Emilio Estevez).  Estevez gives a likable performance but he often seems to be appearing in a different movie from everyone else.  Kirby is working on his law degree and he’s in love with a hospital intern named Dale (Andie MacDowell).  Unfortunately, Dale isn’t as interested in Kirby as he is in her so Kirby responds by stalking her and trying to change her mind.  There’s an earnestness and sincerity to Kirby that makes you like him, even if his behavior is actually rather creepy.

As for the film itself — well, it’s directed by Joel Schumacher and there’s a reason why Schmacher has the reputation that he does.  As a director, Schumacher is good at gathering together an attractive cast but he has close to no idea how to tell a compelling story.  St. Elmo’s Fire plods along, dutifully telling its story but providing little insight or surprise.

If you’ve read some of my previous reviews, you’re probably expecting this to be the point where I argue that St. Elmo’s Fire works as a time capsule.  But, honestly, this film doesn’t have enough insight to really work as a time capsule.  I mean, if you love 80s hair and 80s fashion, you might enjoy St. Elmo’s Fire but, then again, you could always just do a google image search and have the same basic experience.