Johnny Be Good (1988)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Johnny Be Good: Directed by Bud Smith and written by Steve Zacharias, Jeff Buhai and David Obst.Tomatometer rating is 0%. That's right folks this movie has absolutely no positive reviews out of 11. I didn't hate this movie. This reminded me a lot of the New Guy in the sense that it reeks of the era in which it was made. It has such an 80s feel that it can be made no other time. This is an over the top comedy where every movement and line reading is cartoonishly inflated to grand proportions. It has non stop musical moments. It has montages out of the wazoo. It is taking the serious allegations of college trying lure high school athletes to certain colleges with deals meant to cater to their baser instincts and making it seem outlandish. It's not. It is something that happens and it's okay to lampoon it. This movie though just gave me a headache. It was a barrage of music and terrible unfunny comedy. The performances were right on the edge. I liked Anthony Michael Hall and Paul Gleason but Robert Downey Jr was insufferable in this film. He was wild and crazy for every single thing he did and it became too much very quickly. Thankfully though the movie was very short. It clocks in at 82 minutes. I wanted to like this movie. I really did but something felt off about the entire film from the very beginning. Nothing could be done to shake no matter how many lavish over the top mockery of Texas football there was. I give this movie a D.

Just three years after "The Breakfast Club", this film reunites Michael Anthony Hall and Paul Gleason. It aims to achieve the irreverent humor of a film like "Stripes" combined with the titillation of "Porky's". Almost every character in this film is a caricature. You can tell a lot of people put a lot of work into this film, so where does it go wrong?First, the film's primary story--about a football phenom who is unscrupulously recruited by every powerhouse program in the country--is a serious drag on the humor. There is nothing funny about the sacrifice of educational values to the football money machine.Secondly, the film tries to include every standard feature of every youth comedy film--the clueless adults, the topless scenes, the humor centering on sex and alcohol--and in so doing, becomes a parody of itself.I am deducting one point just for the colossal waste of talent.Robert Downey Jr. is wasted here, playing the wacky sidekick. Uma Thurman's performance as the hometown girlfriend is lost in the silliness. The entire film is predictable, sometimes cringe-worthy, and boring.In a scene near the end of the film Hall, Downey and Thurman drive off in a convertible to begin their post-high school lives and there is a sense of what this film could have been: an interesting exploration of the lives of three kids who have issues to face and things to learn. It might even have been funny, too.

I'm not sure where all these bad reviews are coming from. I haven't watched this movie in years but I remember it as a very funny movie that made good fun of the college football recruiting process. I was thinking about this movie the other day and decided to check out the rating for this movie and was shocked to see that it was hovering around 4.1. I must have seen an entirely different movie or there are a lot of people that don't see this movie the way I saw it. I loved Micheal Anthony Hall movies back in the day and this is one of my all time favorites. I really liked 16 candles as well as Noation Lampoons Vacation. Who can forget Weird Science. So there is no way this movie deserves a 4.1 review. 10 all the way for me. Really probably around a high 7 but since people are all butt hurt by this movie for some reason I'm giving it a 10.

This film is about various colleges doing unscrupulous acts in order to attract a talented American football player to study in their college."Johnny Be Good" has a bad plot and has poor acting. I normally like Uma Thurman, but her role in this is small and dispensable. There are so many implausible scenes which are so bad that they become funny. It is so bad that it becomes entertaining. For example, where did the well dressed cheerleaders come from in the spontaneous game in front of Georgia's house? And that flamboyant outfit Johnny goes home with is ridiculously bad. Leo Wiggins, played by Robert Downey Jr., has very little screen time, but he is memorable role in a bad way. He is so crazy that he is painful to look at.Maybe it was a good film by 80's standards, but watching it 20 years down the line, it has become an embarrassing joke.