Christopher Columbus

(In French, On TV, September 2019) Despite what you may think, Adventures in Babysitting isn’t a John Hughes film. On the surface, it sure looks like one: The story goes from the Chicago suburbs to the big city itself with middle-class teenage protagonists getting embroiled in adventures in the big city à la Ferris Bueller, alludes to cartoonish villains of Home Alone vintage and spends a significant amount of time making its characters grow up in absentia of any parental supervision … like much of the Hughes oeuvre. But it’s a Christopher Columbus film made from a David Simkins script, and the differences do start to become obvious once you look closer. It tries to have a broader appeal than Hughes film with protagonists going from 8 to 18, is far less structured in its one-thing-after-another approach. (Call it a “picaresque journey through 1987 nighttime Chicago, sanitized for family entertainment”) and it doesn’t hit the sentimentalism as hard as Hughes does. (But do remember that Columbus and Hughes would soon collaborate on 1990’s Home Alone.)  The result, spearheaded by Elisabeth Shue with noteworthy early roles for Vincent d’Onofrio and Penelope Ann Miller, is a bit scattered but amiable enough: it’s not trying to make a grand statement, but the way things quickly spin out of control from a simple premise is amusing enough. Clearly geared toward family entertainment, Adventures in Babysitting remains watchable even thirty years later—there’s some timeless material here about teenagers getting away with awesome thrills while their parents aren’t looking in their direction, and just enough excitement without falling into danger.