This was a disappointment then and is very problematic by modern standards because of its assumptions about class and race. It's the flip side of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Instead of daytime Chicago as an adventure playground for white kids from the North Shore suburbs, it gives us nighttime Chicago as a place of darkness and danger for them.
There are a couple of charming bits -- the gag when the Thor-obsessed 7 year old girl sees the hunky blond mechanic (Vincent Phillip Donofrio) holding the sledgehammer, and when Elizabeth Shue blunders onto the stage of a blues club and has to deliver an impromptu blues rap about her troubles to get off. There's one distasteful bit, also found in Sixteen Candles, where the horny middle school boy gets lucky snogging an older girl too drunk to know what she is doing.
But the main problem is the structure of the romance. The picture starts with Elizabeth Shue dancing and dressing for a date to "And Then He Kissed Me, which is used as a sexual "I want" song like "It Might As Well Be Spring" in State Fair. The driver of the plot is that Shue's ripe high school virgin is on the brink of falling in love and having sex with someone, almost anyone, though not, it turns out, her impatient high school boyfriend. The structure of the story requires her to meet and fall in love with some guy who earns her. That should be be the native boy who guides her and protects her from the dangers of the urban jungle (I use those racist tropes deliberately because the movie does) at great risk and effort. But he's too urban, too poor, and above all too black for this nice blonde white girl from the 'burbs, so he disappears by the wayside. Instead, out of nowhere the movie throws her this random good looking slightly older white college guy at a fraternity party. She melts for him apparently because why not, it has to be somebody. Not only is the ending distasteful, it falls completely flat as a romance. And I've always wondered how Shue is going to explain to her parents where she met this older college guy the first time he comes to the house to pick her up for a date.
There are a couple of charming bits -- the gag when the Thor-obsessed 7 year old girl sees the hunky blond mechanic (Vincent Phillip Donofrio) holding the sledgehammer, and when Elizabeth Shue blunders onto the stage of a blues club and has to deliver an impromptu blues rap about her troubles to get off. There's one distasteful bit, also found in Sixteen Candles, where the horny middle school boy gets lucky snogging an older girl too drunk to know what she is doing.
But the main problem is the structure of the romance. The picture starts with Elizabeth Shue dancing and dressing for a date to "And Then He Kissed Me, which is used as a sexual "I want" song like "It Might As Well Be Spring" in State Fair. The driver of the plot is that Shue's ripe high school virgin is on the brink of falling in love and having sex with someone, almost anyone, though not, it turns out, her impatient high school boyfriend. The structure of the story requires her to meet and fall in love with some guy who earns her. That should be be the native boy who guides her and protects her from the dangers of the urban jungle (I use those racist tropes deliberately because the movie does) at great risk and effort. But he's too urban, too poor, and above all too black for this nice blonde white girl from the 'burbs, so he disappears by the wayside. Instead, out of nowhere the movie throws her this random good looking slightly older white college guy at a fraternity party. She melts for him apparently because why not, it has to be somebody. Not only is the ending distasteful, it falls completely flat as a romance. And I've always wondered how Shue is going to explain to her parents where she met this older college guy the first time he comes to the house to pick her up for a date.