TheSteelHelmetReturns Review of All the Right Moves

All the Right Moves (1983)

All the right moves is alright. <- That's your pun, the review is below.

[7/10 · 6 November 2010]

All the Right Moves begins with the triumphant synth rock melody of David Campbell's score accompanied by shots of grimy working class settings of train terminals and factories indicating that viewer is in store for a blue collar John Hughes films that has one foot in eighties cinema and the other still dipped in the obsessions with 70s New Hollywood. Tom Cruise is quite convincing as a working class jock while Lea Thompson as she only helps to bring up connotations of herself in Back to the Future and would seem more appropriate in a world of upper middle class WASPs like Growing Pains or Family Ties rather than the lurid Welcome Back Kotter universe of All the Right Moves. Perhaps Cruise needed a girlfriend who seemed a little sluttier but still had Thompson's vulnerability? Ally McSheedy? Chris Penn plays Cruise's less attractive jock pal and Craig T. Nelson establishes his typecast as a humourless coach and all three characters express similar desires very early in the film about 'moving on' and escaping their working class background. Knowing the direction that the manufacturing industry would take in the 80s this is probably an understandable goal. However, each character have obstacles preventing them from establishing that dream - some of which are intertwined. Lea Thompson contributes to this story by making Tom Cruise sexually frustrated during awkward love scenes. High school football is used as a metaphor for cooperating to exceed ones limits as detailed by Craig T. Nelson in a pre-game speech that would lead to him being fired if it were uttered today let alone ten years ago. It's at this point of the review, I wish to remind the viewer I have no idea how American Football works - all I know is people jump on each other and touchdown is a good thing. Anyway some play happens in the game that causes Cruise to be thrown off the team for disciplinary reasons and this all leads to a descent that includes being falsely framed for terrorising the neighbourhood and the last half hour of the film covers a number of other plot twists that occur from that one prior conflict along with a short resolution. With just under ninety minutes of run time All the Right Moves is a satisfyingly short rise and fall and rise story with an interesting mix of New Hollywood drama and the emerging 80s teen film genre.