chris columbus’s first film as director is a single-night chicago odyssey. chris parker (elisabeth shue), a high school senior, gets stood up by her boyfriend and ends up babysitting the anderson kids: eight-year-old sara (maia brewton), who is obsessed with thor, and her fifteen-year-old brother brad (keith coogan). what starts as a quiet night in oak park turns into a journey across the city after chris’s friend brenda runs away to a downtown bus station.
the kids pile into the station wagon and head toward the city. a flat tire, a tow truck driver with a gun, a stolen cadillac, and a car theft ring later, they are on the run from an organized crime boss. the group bounces from a blues club on the south side (where the band makes them sing for their freedom) to a gang fight on the L train, a fraternity party, and a showdown at a skyscraper. sara mistakes a blond mechanic named dawson for thor. she is not entirely wrong.
the film is a time capsule of mid-eighties teen comedy, but it has a tougher pulse than most of its peers. the city feels real and dangerous in a way that ferris bueller’s chicago never did. the set pieces stack up fast and the cast holds it together: shue is the heart, brewton is the comic engine, and vincent d’onofrio shows up as dawson in an early role. the blues club sequence, where the bandleader albert collins plays while the kids improvise a song about their night, is the kind of scene that makes a film stick around for forty years.
columbus would go on to make home alone and mrs. doubtfire, but this is his rawest comedy. it has the energy of a director who knows he gets one shot and throws everything at the screen. the thor helmet stays.
image: lisimg.com screenshot (blues club scene), pre-brightened 1.40x, baked at factor 0.45, final mean brightness 18.7