Ferris Bueller's Day Off Critique


Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), starring Matthew Broderick with Mia Sara and Alan Ruck, is a teen comedy by John Hughes. Broderick plays Ferris Bueller, a whimsical and wily high school senior who malingers for a day out in the city of Chicago with his best friend, Cameron, and his girlfriend, Sloane. 

If you don't give much thought to it, the movie can be enjoyed simply as a light-hearted and positive comedy. But if you spend time to consider deeper aspects of its message, you'll find some interesting things. There are a lot of relationships and themes that can be unpacked in this movie. Ferris's relationships with his parents, his sister, his principal, Cameron, and Sloane, as well as Cameron's relationship with his father, speak to various themes, like resistance to authority, seizing the day and living life to the fullest, and jealousy.

The smörgåsbord of extremely relatable issues and dynamics at play in Hughes' movie is a critical component of its success across all audiences, and contributed to its spot as #10 highest grossing film in the US in 1986 (having the bad luck to be released in the same year as Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, The Karate Kid Part II, Star Trek IV, Aliens, and other such famous names). The Library of Congress selected the film to be preserved in the National Film Registry in 2014 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

All in all, the characters of Ferris and Cameron were very well performed, and the humor and tone also deserve praise.

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