St. Elmo's Fire

There's very little plot in the movie, just an excursion through the growing pains of some very plastic characters. The script by Schumacher and Carl Kurlander is more a character outline than a screenplay because there simply isn't enough meat to flesh it out. [8 July 1985]

The screenplay for this 1985 feature is so riddled with character inconsistencies and unmotivated behavior that it plays like science fiction: the unsuspected presence of body-snatching aliens is the only conceivable explanation for the bizarre twists of psychology the film proposes. Read full review

Beyond occasional mutterings of words like ‘love’ and ‘beer,’ there’s never any explanation in the dialog that would hint at motivation. Read full review

Barely has there been a group of more smug and obnoxious characters in a single film than in St. Elmo`s Fire. Read full review

The most remarkable failure of the film is that the principals don't seem even to like each other very much, despite their habit of facing the future arm in arm. There's a lot of cute flesh up on the screen, signifying nothing. [28 June 1985, p.D1]

Director Joel Schumacher has fashioned a film foul enough to qualify as an inadvertent satire - it's obvious Schumacher (D.C. Cab) wants the audience to care about the septet, but the writing is so rocky, the situations so contrived, the acting so awkward and the characters so self-centred, witless and amoral, it's almost as if St. Elmo's Fire had been conceived as a vicious anti-youth movie, a calculated attempt to destroy en masse the reputations of some of Hollywood's hottest young actors. [28 June 1985]

Estevez and Nelson are as unappealing here as in The Breakfast Club, though in fairness they're hampered by a script that seems to despise its characters. So, by the end, will you. Read full review