atlasmb Just three years after "The Breakfast Club", this film reunites Michael Anthony Hall and Paul Gleason. It aims to achieve the irreverent humor of a film like "Stripes" combined with the titillation of "Porky's". Almost every character in this film is a caricature. You can tell a lot of people put a lot of work into this film, so where does it go wrong?First, the film's primary story--about a football phenom who is unscrupulously recruited by every powerhouse program in the country--is a serious drag on the humor. There is nothing funny about the sacrifice of educational values to the football money machine.Secondly, the film tries to include every standard feature of every youth comedy film--the clueless adults, the topless scenes, the humor centering on sex and alcohol--and in so doing, becomes a parody of itself.I am deducting one point just for the colossal waste of talent.Robert Downey Jr. is wasted here, playing the wacky sidekick. Uma Thurman's performance as the hometown girlfriend is lost in the silliness. The entire film is predictable, sometimes cringe-worthy, and boring.In a scene near the end of the film Hall, Downey and Thurman drive off in a convertible to begin their post-high school lives and there is a sense of what this film could have been: an interesting exploration of the lives of three kids who have issues to face and things to learn. It might even have been funny, too.

ptb-8 A catatonic-ally awful jock-ball pic form the late 80s seems to have been made as a vanity project by some BOOGIE NIGHTS style producers clearly in love with the cute twink looks of Anthiony Michael Hall. He is very desired apparently but all his charm and HOME ALONE star style looks were lost on me. JBG also stars the gorgeous Uma Thurman in a practice role to get a casting reel together, and the great Robert Downey Jnr scoring some easy money before becoming less than zero for a few years. Even Meg Tilly appears for a few squawks. The same three scriptwriters are the three producers and I would bet any money you like there was three big posters of AMH in each of their studio lockers. JBG is terrible, an embarrassment and a fawning leer at a teen actor disguised as a footy comedy. No wonder Orion Pictures went broke. It looks like a subterfuge gay movie pretending to be a mid-west college comedy. Perhaps a gay remake would be better. It would have to be.

vogeljf This movie was made to be a comedy and not some kind of great documentary. If you didn't play quarterback in high school then you might not like this movie or understand it. Soundtrack was great and Paul Gleason as the coach is flat out the best high school football coach ever in a movie period! His pregame speech before the state championship game at the beginning of the movie is classic. It ranks just ahead of John Goodman in Revenge of the Nerds. Watch this classic over and over again and remember how unimportant high school football coaches really are in life! There are way worse movies out there than Johnny Be Good! This movie is not even close to being as cheesy as Varsity Blues, even though I quite enjoyed that movie as well. Obviously neither one of these movies are going to win an Oscar, but not all movies are made to win an Oscar. This movie is way better than Eyes Wide Shut and you could watch Johnny Be Good twice and go out to dinner before Eyes Wide Shut is over.

Jordan_Haelend Well, I did it. I had heard about how bad this movie was and I went down to the Borders Books & Music and bought it. After having turned it on and shut it off on at least 10 successive occasions, I finally made it to the end tonight. You see, every time I fired it up I thought, "The rest of it can't possibly be as awful as the part I just watched. They can't possibly insult the viewer's intelligence any more than they have." The filmmakers proved me wrong each time.The script was clunky, the photography is badly framed and poorly shot, and much of the film just doesn't make any sense. Also, there isn't a single sequence the conclusion of which you can't see coming from a mile away- come on, of COURSE Johhny's "side" was going to win the impromptu football game when he has one hand shackled behind his back- and his girl is the prize! And Johnny Walker strutting down the Main street of his staid, middle-American town dressed like he's on his way to a Gay bar on Cowboy Night?! How ELSE would his straight-laced family react than with shock, indignation and disgust? As to the actors, Uma is lovely, Downey is Downey (and I admit is pretty good in his standard hopped-up sidekick role, especially in the motel scenes,) but Hall seems completely uninterested in what he's doing. He really acts as if he didn't really want to do this film, in spite of the fact that he DID want a vehicle that would break his Brat Pack Geek-in-Chief image. I felt sorry for him. He was really cute, but that was it. His character, Johnny Walker, speaks to a crowd of having embarrassed himself towards the end of the picture. To me, it seemed that Hall delivered those lines with utter conviction, and I'm not surprised. If this were on my resume, I'd deny it. Hall has, of course, gone on to a viable and even admirable career. I guess it's really true that you can't keep a good man down, even if he makes such a potentially suicidal career choice as this film. It's a testament to the man's drive and determination to succeed that he left trash like this far behind him and kept working.Another gripe I have: screenwriters Zacharias and Buhai wrote the original "Revenge of the Nerds," so they ought to have known what would work in a Youth comedy. Apparently they forgot.The two worst aspects of this film, however, were these: first, it was unbelievably boring (and a bad movie that is boring is the worst bad movie of all); secondly, the lampooning of corruption in collegiate football is a viable topic and it could have worked if the script had been decent, the story been told in a logically plotted arc, Bud Smith hadn't directed and Hall had acted like he cared (and not mumbled his lines as if he were auditioning for the first time at a Junior High School's offering of Romeo and Juliet.) I give this ludicrous waste of my time a 1.