Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Lack of good storyline.

Good movie but grossly overrated

Best movie ever!

I remember seeing Reckless when I was in middle school. It was an incredibly racy movie for the time--even though it pales in comparison to what teenagers see today. It was also the movie where I developed a lifelong crush on Aidan Quinn.I just re-watched this movie (3 times, actually) for the first time in more than 20 years. It holds up. There is no question that some of the dialogue/delivery is flat out cheesy: "Tracey, I love you", "You're the coach" and anything the coach actually says. But there are some golden moments in this film that I could watch over and over again. It has been mentioned before, but the dance scene is superb--the circling of the camera, the quintessential 80s bounce-dance, and Aidan Quinn's amazing, punk moves--not to mention the song by Romeo Void. It is one of the first times we actually see the character Tracey really smile. The "Kids in America" scene...awkward and sexy and a little bit odd but utterly perfect in the way the sexual tension builds. The sex scenes were realistic and erotic--especially the way they were filmed without accompanying background music. The movie has a quick pace, although it still feels like there is something missing at times. Daryl Hannah has always bugged me a bit as an actress, but she generates a lot of heat with Aidan Quinn, though I'm not sure if this was his doing or theirs together. Because with the exception of a few moments, she can be very wooden. Still, it didn't really diminish the movie for me as I think her character was meant to be icy until she began to interact with Johnny. Which brings me back to Aidan Quinn. In the beginning of the film, he makes your heart break for Johnny's loneliness. Everyone celebrates after the football game, which he basically won, and he goes to sit on the overlook, cold and alone. Quinn's facial expressions are 75% of his acting--and I mean that as a good thing. When Tracey undresses by the pool...and he gives his half smile. When they are making love in her parents' bed and his face radiates his happiness. When they are making love in the boiler room, his expressions make you understand why she wants him so badly. When he sees her at the funeral and he realizes that she cares. When he walks by her at school after they fight and he can't bear to look at her. When he is trying initially to de-escalate the confrontation with his coach when he is late for practice. This scene, by the way, makes my hear hurt for the way some kids/students are treated by those who have no idea what they go through outside of school. I love 80s movies--but I find it funny that the most underrated ones made the most impression on me: Reckless and Fire with Fire. Neither are going to win any Oscars, but that's not why I watch them. When I watch this movie, I feel like a teenager all over again.

I was a teenager working at the Cineplex when I saw this movie for the first time. It doesn't take much to stir teenage angst, and longing. I was an easy target for this movie. You see, at the time, I too was in a doomed relationship with a girl that was all wrong for me (or so it seemed to the myopic teenage eye). She was a drill team princess and I was a nobody from the wrong side of the tracks. I had an immediate emotional response to Johnny and Tracey's dilemma. It resonated with me powerfully at the time. "Reckless" has lingered in my memory along with all the other sweet nostalgia from my youth. Time and distance grant you clarity. So now, twenty four years later, I think I can review this movie with a much more critical eye. After seeing it again recently on a fairly good VHS copy, some of the strengths that I remember are still there. The beautiful cinematography that is reminiscent of "The Dear Hunter" is still there. Many of the shots in the film give the Pennsylvania mill town a bleak and forlorn look that matches Johnny's life. The editing is dead-on and lends this film an urgency that matches the story. The music is used effectively throughout. Inxs, Romeo Void, and Kim Wilde, just to name a few, give each scene the 'feel' it needs to enhance the story. The home coming dance scene where Johnny punks out to 'Never Say Never' is a great example of how bringing together great acting, editing, music, and energetic camera-work into a scene can get an audience's heart rate going. The scene still holds up after all these years. Fresh faced earnestness of the performances from Quinn and Hannah also make this movie very watchable. Despite all of it's strengths, I couldn't ignore the glaring shortcomings. First off, Quinn's character, Johnny, is not really very believable. To be more precise, the way girls react to him in the film (with the notable exception of Tracey) is not really believable. Look at some of the opening scenes where some of Tracey's fellow cheerleaders treat him like a leper and call him a weirdo. Who are we kidding? Let's face it, as far back as James Dean, good looking, brooding guys on motorcycles have been babe magnets. Had I known this back then, I would have saved my money for a bike instead of blowing it on beer and fast food every weekend. I will pause this review briefly to kick myself…. Okay, I'm back. On with my review. Johnny's relationship with the older lady at the bowling alley is never developed although it seems to hold promise for further developments. Perhaps a love triangle? I dunno, it just seems kinda weird how it is given attention, and then dropped. Aside from Quinn's character, all other characters are fairly two dimensional. Tracey feels underwritten. She's a perfect princess that decides to rebel just because her life is too perfect? Really? Huh. At least that's what a brief two minute scene tries to sell us on for her motivation for ending up with Johnny on her first night. Did I miss something? I attribute these anemic characters to an underdeveloped script that comes across as clichéd and formulaic.In most instances, this would be the death of any film. At least for me it would be. But because of all it's other strengths, it actually turns out to be a pretty engaging little movie, even after all these years. "Reckless" is a fine example of how style, and shameless pandering to the teenage psyche, can sometimes triumph over a substandard script.

In the 1980s the youth market was becoming increasingly important to film-makers, and the decade saw a growth in the number of films aimed at, and about, teenagers. "Reckless" is a good example of the sort of high school romance in which the main characters are both in their mid-twenties. Or rather, the two characters are supposed to be teenagers, but the actors who play them are in their mid-twenties. This is something of a convention in American films of this type, the rationale presumably being that story lines about underage sex become more acceptable to the censors (and possibly to the viewing public as well) if the roles are played by adults. Adherence to this convention was particularly important in the case of "Reckless", which is a good deal more sexually explicit than most high school romance dramas.Director James Foley makes quite deliberate reference to a number of earlier movies about youthful rebelliousness, such as "The Wild One", "Rebel without a Cause" and "The Graduate". The film is set in a Mid-Western industrial town where the main industry is steel making. During the Reagan years America's traditional heavy industries were in decline, and towns like the one shown here were often badly hit by unemployment. (Something similar also happened in Britain at the same time).The main character, Johnny Rourke, is a boy from a working-class background. His parents are divorced, and he lives with his hard-drinking, foul-mouthed father, a worker at the local steel mill. Although Johnny is supposedly from a poor family, it is notable that he drives a powerful motorbike, which struck me as improbable. As their relationship is, to say the least, a difficult one, it is unlikely that his father would have bought him such an expensive present, even if he could have afforded it, and there is no way that Johnny could have purchased it himself while still at school. Ever since Brando in "The Wild One", however, motorbikes have been a powerful symbol of rebellion, and this is clearly a case where symbolism was felt to be more important than verisimilitude.Like Jim Stark in the film of that name, Johnny can be classed as a "rebel without a cause", although he seems to have even more anger than James Dean's character. During this period many young men in his position would have been fearful of the prospect of unemployment, but Johnny seems to be more worried about the prospect of employment, or at least of being employed, like his father, in a dead-end job in a dead-end town. Johnny has seen what his home town has to offer, and doesn't want it. The problem is, he doesn't know what he does want, with one exception.Johnny is a star player in the school football team (although he later gets thrown off the team for insubordination), and the one thing he does want is Tracey, a glamorous blonde cheerleader from a wealthy family. Although Tracey already has a boyfriend, Randy, she finds herself attracted to Johnny, largely because of what he represents- rejection of her family's snobbish middle-class values. (They, needless to say, disapprove strongly of Johnny).There are some good things about the film. There is some effective photography of the industrial landscapes, similar to those in "Flashdance" which had come out the previous year. Contrary to the impression sometimes given by Hollywood, not everyone in America lives in affluent white-collar suburbia. The film also makes good use of the pop music of the period, such as Kim Wilde's "Kids in America", to the strains of which Johnny and Tracey make love.On the whole, however, I found the film disappointing. Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah were two attractive young people, but neither seemed convincing as a teenager. James Dean, of course, was also in his twenties when he made "Rebel….", but he seemed completely believable as a confused, vulnerable adolescent. Quinn and Hannah, however, are less credible. Quinn in particular comes across as too adult, too confident and self-assured. There are also some very strange scenes, such as the one where Johnny and Tracey, as a prelude to making love, belabour each other with what look like gigantic sausages.Wilde sang in "Kids in America" that "You know life is cruel, life is never kind". Foley, however, evidently felt that his intended teenage audience would not be mature enough to appreciate this stark truth, so he provided the film with a contrived happy ending, presumably based upon the one in "The Graduate", as Tracey jumps onto Johnny's motorbike and they go roaring off down the highway together. At least, this was presumably intended to be a happy ending, although I was left with the awkward feeling that these two characters made a very ill-matched pair. Tracey, after all, is committing herself to a man with no job, no home (after his father's death in an industrial accident, Johnny has set fire to the family home) and no prospects, except possibly the prospect of serving a jail sentence if the police ever find out who was responsible for the fire. If Tracey had stopped to think more clearly, she might have wondered (as I did) whether Johnny is really in love with her, or whether seducing a virginal middle-class cheerleader is simply his way of expressing his anger and resentment against the system. This was a film which really needed a more downbeat ending. 5/10

First, how can you hate a film that utilizes both INXS and Romeo Void on its soundtrack? It's so '80s, but in the best way. That was the New Wave in music, and it fits, it fits with the story. The story is an old one, the poor little rich girl, so intrigued by the bad boy, the one with the troubled history, the unsettled home life, the one with the intense blue eyes, the boy who is obviously more of a "man" than her own boyfriend. She has to know about him, and she gets the chance when they are selected to attend the high school dance as a couple, much to her boyfriend's dismay.His desire to leave their sleepy steel town, the little depressed, economically, hellhole with nowhere to go but down, is a catalyst for her, along with his seductive charms. He "wants" her, he tells her, and she wants him, but can't bear to let him know, without him forcing it out of her. He opens her up, sexually, mentally, he challenges her, and there are some really erotic scenes to show all of this.Don't dismiss this film as fluff, or "plotless", there is a definite plot, it's an old one, used many times, but never quite to this effect, with these actors, with people this lovely to look at, this talented, with a soundtrack so perfectly fitting. It's a good movie, and has some really nice, creative camera work - the high school dance scene, camera swirling around Darryl Hannah and Aidan Quinn, is classic. A perfect little movie moment.I recommend this movie, to anyone who likes erotic romances, or who wants to see a good example of why Aidan Quinn got so many parts in movies, or why Darryl Hannah was once so popular. These two light up the screen. The soundtrack is pure '80s, the tail end of the New Wave movement in music, and it's well preserved today.