Watch All the Right Moves For Free

Truly Dreadful Film

As Good As It Gets

The acting in this movie is really good.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Stef Djordjevic (Tom Cruise) lives in poor Pennsylvanian town Ampipe, a company town for American Pipe & Steel. He is the high school football star defensive back. He has his girlfriend Lisa Lietzke (Lea Thompson) and dreams of a college engineering scholarship. After a lost, Stef fights with Coach Nickerson (Craig T. Nelson) and is kicked off the team. Nickerson's home is vandalized and the coach blames Stef. Stef finds himself blacklisted from colleges. His friend Brian (Chris Penn) is forced to marry his pregnant girlfriend. The mill lays off his brother and he's desperate to escape the town.It's a very traditional small town kid struggles. Tom Cruise makes it better than its simple premise. He's full of himself and full of angst. It's also interesting that Craig T. Nelson isn't a simple character. Lea Thompson probably plays the most endearing and compelling character. Her talk with Mrs. Nickerson is fascinating. The teenage desperation is palpable although some of it is bad cliché. It reminds me a little of 'Friday Night Lights' but nowhere near as good.

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.

Directed by Michael Chapman, "All The Right Moves" stars Tom Cruise as a kid who seeks to escape the drudgery of small-town life by winning a football scholarship.Typically in such films, it's only our central hero who wishes to skip town. But in "Moves", everyone in the town is hoping for a scholarship or chance to flee. Because of this, they're all competing against one another, and we the audience are always aware that if one succeeds it's only at someone else's expense.Who would ordinarily be "the villain" of this picture, a football coach who kicks Cruise off the team, is thus painted in a sympathetic and complex light. He too is shown to only be acting in his own personal interests, all in the hopes of obtaining a career promotion. The end result of all of this is, yes, a typical fairy tale ending, but also a weird advocation for a kind of communal collaboration in which everyone learns to work as a team and stop trampling over one another.Beyond this the film is beautifully shot, captures the dreary, rain drenched ambiance of small town Pennsylvania, features a couple surprisingly raw dialogue sequences and drifts into issues like teen pregnancy and social determinism, issues which these flicks typically avoid. Cruise, young and per-fame, sells his role with conviction.7.9/10 – Despite a terrible last act, this odd little film is interesting in the way it merges the grit of 1970s cinema with the superficiality of 80s Hollywood. Worth one viewing.

The most noteworthy thing about this movie, and probably the only reason why it's still around, is that it has Tom Cruise in one of his earliest starring roles. Aside from that, there isn't really much to it. It's not bad I guess, but it's just all so plain and mediocre except for some of the acting. This script is one of the most predictable things ever written and just hums by with no surprises of any sort. You can't bring a lot of variation within the formula of a small town drama, but for the love of God, try a little. Often it just really needs to get to the point, because things get pretty boring if you already know the ending an hour beforehand. The raw, realistic filming style of the movie is in fact pretty good and really expresses desperation, but it just doesn't make the story any more interesting. As far as very young Tom Cruise goes, it's "Risky Business" all the way.