Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1984 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1983 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s February 3, 1984, and we’re off to see Reckless!
The Lonely Guy
Do you love rebellious teen films like Rebel Without a Cause? Apparently, the people making Reckless did and thought they should add absolutely nothing new to the formula.
Johnny Rourke (Aidan Quinn) is a troubled teen who lives with his alcoholic father. Neither of them has moved past the fact Johnny’s mother left them years ago. Meanwhile, Tracey Prescott (Daryl Hannah) has it all from the football boyfriend to the rich life in suburbia, but she is clearly unhappy and haunted by dark thoughts about what her life means. Neither of them is that into the other at first, but they quickly discover they are kindred souls who both desperately want more from life.
If you already saw All the Right Moves in 1983, you pretty much saw Reckless. From its factory town setting, to the male lead being on the football team, to the girl being a popular girl. It feels like Reckless was written by someone looking over another student’s shoulder and cribbing some notes they couldn’t quite make out. If it wasn’t for the fact these movies came out just under four months apart I would say Reckless is a direct ripoff.
The movie is just top-to-bottom filled with cliches and absolute nonsense that you have to begin to wonder if anyone actually knew what anyone else in the production was doing. Towards the end of the film when Johnny finally asks Tracey to leave town with him, he steps out into the school hallway and… gets on his motorcycle. There is never any sort of establishment where he had ridden his bike into the school; it’s just there.
Chris Columbus is credited as writer on this film and went on to make several classics such as Gremlins and The Goonies. Apparently, they changed so much of his script on set that he cried in the theater when watching it, and I can see why.
Reckless is a trainwreck of a film that borders on ‘so bad, it’s good,’ but it fails even at accomplishing that.
1984 Movie Reviews will return on Feb. 10, 2024 with Unfaithfully Yours!
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