What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know this film is a rambunctious, noisy,
pirate-themed treasure-hunt action-fantasy -- all the
ingredients kids will love. Kids are in peril, they find a dead
body, are being hunted by thieves who are after their treasure
map, and fall into all kinds of trouble. If you can overlook
the produced-by-Steven-Spielberg level of special effects,
cavernous (literally) sets, stunts, hideous skeletons and
outsized props, there's an equally second-hand message about
being yourself and bonding with your friends and sibling --
even if they're outcast "
Goonies. Some vulgar humor and swearing, as well as
in-your-face product placements. The movie may be too scary for
some kids, so know your kid before you watch.
Families can discuss the excitement within the movie. What kind of bond do these friends have? Are the characters relatable? What about the film inspires adventure in your kid?
Common Sense Media Review
Imagine the Bad News Bears in the Temple of Doom of the
Caribbean. That sums up this rambunctious, 1980s adventure romp
from Steven Spielberg's production company and screenwriter
Chris Columbus (himself later to direct the HARRY POTTER
features).
Director Richard Donner (whose SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE is made the subject of one gag reference) got solid performances out of an ensemble of young talent -- Mikey (Sean Astin), Brand (Josh Brolin), Mouth (Corey Feldman), Chunk (Jeff Cohen), Data (Jonathan Ke Quan).
Goonies is set in a coastal town in the Pacific Northwest, where a homey, slightly ramshackle neighborhood called the Goondocks is threatened with foreclosure and redevelopment by nasty yuppies. Local kids, motley outcasts known as "goonies," are cleaning out when they find a treasure map and clues to the legendary loot of a 17th-century pirate chieftain, `One-Eyed Willie.' With that kind of windfall the goonies could save their homes.
Clues lead the kids beneath a closed-down restaurant, lair of a crime family of counterfeiters, who keep a super-strong, monstrously-deformed son, known as Sloth (the late football star John Matuszak), chained in the basement. The bad guys chase after the children, who must negotiate a number of deadly Rube Goldberg booby-traps set centuries ago by One-Eyed Willie, as they explore through a maze of underground caverns and skeleton-strewn chambers (always nicely lit, somehow). Fortunately, a captured goonie, the fat, clumsy Chunk (Jeff Cohen) befriends Sloth, who lumbers to the whole gang's rescue.
You might impress young viewers with the trivia that the sickly, smart Mikey, who acts as the brains and conscience of the goonies, is played by Sean Astin, who returned to a milieu of slogging through caves and tunnels when he starred as the hobbit Samwise in the blockbuster LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Mikey's older sibling Brandon (Josh Brolin) tries to disassociate himself from the misfit goonies and hang out with the cooler guys at high school (most of whom seem affiliated with the greedy adults trying to tear down the shoreline), but by the end of the movie he's bonded with his kid brother. Of course, little emotional details like that are sometimes lost with the theme-park-scale waterfalls, waterslides, drawbridges, and a full-sized treasure ship around which the plot is erected.
Jonathan Ke Quan had just starred as the engaging little-boy sidekick opposite Harrison Ford in the blockbuster INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, and it's easy to pigeonhole THE GOONIES as much the same material, with less onscreen gore and pitched more obviously at the elementary-school and junior-high audience. And while there's nothing too wrong with that, THE GOONIES does feel every bit as long as its 114 minutes and contains some pretty obnoxious commercial-product placements and "cute" swearing. And no Johnny Depp or Harrison Ford in the cast to outdo the special effects, though the makeup people did a pretty good job on the grotesque Sloth.
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
