Review: Adventures in Babysitting

High school senior Elisabeth Shue isn’t having a good day, after her jerk boyfriend (the perfectly cast Bradley Whitford) stands her up. And now she’s being asked to babysit nerdy teen Keith Coogan (who lusts after Shue, only a few years older than him) and his Thor-obsessed kid sister Maia Brewton. Also turning up is Coogan’s even nerdier friend Anthony Rapp. When Shue receives a call from her friend Penelope Ann Miller to say she regrets having run away from home, and broke, she needs a lift home, Shue and the kids make the trek into the city. Unfortunately, the journey is full of mishaps involving jealous tow-truck drivers, car thieves, menacing crooks, and surly mechanics (the latter played by Vincent D’Onofrio). Oh, and there’s a Playboy magazine featuring a centrefold that looks an awful lot like Shue. George Newbern turns up as a nice guy college student, Ron Canada is a crook, Calvin Levels a soft-centred car thief, and a young Lolita Davidovich (billed as Lolita David) turns up briefly at a party.

 

I probably shouldn’t have left watching this 1987 teen flick from debut director Chris Columbus (“Home Alone”, “Mrs. Doubtfire”, writer of the seminal kiddie adventure flick “The Goonies”) and writer David Simkins (who went on to write episodes of “Lois & Clark”, “Charmed”, and “Warehouse 13”) until now, but what can I say? It escaped me all these years. And now that I’ve seen it? Meh. I’ve never been a fan of this ‘one crazy night in the city’-type plot (“After Hours”, “Cold Dog Soup”, “Date Night”, etc.), but it’s not a bad entry in that subgenre, I guess. It’s a good showcase for the charismatic and stunningly beautiful Elisabeth Shue (in a role that, amusingly to pop culture nerds like me both Christina Applegate and Nicole Eggert, among others auditioned for), but not much else.

 

It has been a bit overrated by some, to be honest and only sporadically amusing. The blues club scene in particular is cringe-worthy, though everyone else seems to consider it the high point of the film (That’s OK, you’re allowed to be wrong). Keith Coogan is well-cast as a likeable nerd, juvenile TV actress Maia Brewton steals scenes as she always tended to, and there’s a funny bit where they accept a lift from a hook-handed tow-truck driver who drives them to his house to confront his wife and her lover. He shoots, the kids get into the lovers car…and find themselves in the presence of car thief Calvin Levels. Clever, and Mr. Levels proves to be something altogether different the more time the protagonists spend with him. However, do I need to point out that when Shue says ‘I’m too old to babysit’, my reaction was ‘That ain’t the half of it, sister’? Things get even more Gabrielle Carteris (look her up, kids) when Penelope Ann Miller turns up as Shue’s best friend. It was only three years later she’d play the mother of a kindergartener in 1990’s “Kindergarten Cop” for cryin’ out loud (Meanwhile, Keith Coogan would apparently need babysitting again four years later in the not dissimilar “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead”, with Christina Applegate).

 

Maybe worth a glance on TV if you’re a Shue fan, or wanna know what Lolita Davidovich’s natural hair colour is, though she only has a cameo. Pretty sure Vincent D’Onofrio ain’ a natural blond, by the way.  Oh, and don’t listen to IMDb, it’s not known as “A Night on the Town” in Australia. I saw it on cable under “Adventures in Babysitting”. Not sure what’s going on there.

 

Rating: C+