Blast From The Past Reviews: Sixteen Candles

I don’t really remember turning sixteen.

I know that is one of the birthdays everyone is supposed to look forward to and remember forever, but I, as a currently 44 year old, don’t recall it at all. I did not wake up to a new car in the driveway or anything, so I suppose it was just another birthday for me. But probably with a lot of “Whoa, watch out on the roads soon!” jokes from my family.

So no… I simply do not recall it. But fictional characters? Man, they have legendary birthdays; the kind that you never forget, no matter how far into your mid-40’s you get! And maybe no fictional character had as memorable a sweet sixteen as Samantha from Sixteen Candles.

Samantha’s most memorable birthday starts off, ironically enough, with everyone forgetting about it. As she makes her way downstairs to her family expecting to be showered in well wishes, it turns out no one has anything to say to her. Even later in the day when her grandparents all arrive for her sister’s upcoming wedding, not one of them recalls that it is Samantha’s birthday.

Not only is Samantha forgotten by her family, though; she is also dealing with her first real crush. She has developed feelings for senior classmate Jake Ryan. He, of course, does not seem to know Samantha exists, and when she does have a chance to talk to him, she freezes up.

On her way home from school on the bus, she is approached by Ted, a freshman geek who decides that Samantha is the object of his desires. And frankly, he’s pretty aggressive about it. But we’ll get into that in a bit.

As Samantha’s birthday progresses, things just get more and more complicated. Will she get the guy? Which guy will it end up being? And will her family ever remember it’s her special day?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Molly Ringwald is the powerhouse of the film. She holds everything together and is easy to root for. She effortlessly combines strength with vulnerability. She has an edge to her exterior, but inside, she is as scared and uncertain as any true teenage girl. John Hughes did a marvelous job writing this character, and Ringwald did an equally amazing one at bringing her to life.

+ Anthony Michael Hall’s Ted is not a particularly savory character. He does a lot of stuff that is, at best, borderline sexual assault here in 2025 that was supposed to be uproarious to audiences in 1984. From the moment you meet him and he pushes Samantha down when she tries to walk away from him, you don’t really want to root for this guy.

That said, the performance is good, and Hall gives the character a good sense of being somewhat earnest. His physical actions all typically suck, as I noted above, but Hall plays him as a guy who, like Samantha, is covering up a terrified and conflicted interior with a display of brash confidence. He, like her, gives an air of realism; we can relate to how he is masking who he really is because most of us have been there.

Because of how Ted is played, you grow to like him in spite of yourself, even if he continues taking advantage of women through the very end of the movie.

– WOW, so a big Down to just… everything involving Long Duk Dong. If the Ted stuff is bad in 2025, this is downright abhorrent. And it adds nothing to the plot. It’s just casual racism filler. Was this the height of hilarity in 1984? I don’t see it. But Dong is the center of all of the supposed humor in this movie, so I guess it must have been.

And yeah, that’s a problem, too: the movie isn’t really funny. The character work is solid, and the movie works best as a teen drama. But the stuff that is supposed to be funny just simply… isn’t. Even besides the racism, you have Ted’s bumbling friends–one played by John Cusack!–and they aren’t drawing any real laughs, either.

But yeah, it’s tough to look past Dong. This movie genuinely thinks playing a gong sound effect nearly every time he appears is a good joke. You know… a gong. Because he’s Asian. And he says things like “You no yanky my wanky!”. It’s really, truly, inconceivably bad stuff.

– Speaking of the gong hits for Long Duk Dong, the bizarre sound effects and audio cues in this picture are so off-putting and weird. John Hughes is a better director than this; I’ve seen other movies of his, and I know he can do superior work. But this feels really amateurish and silly, like he just discovered the buttons to play dumb sounds and can’t get enough of it.

Parts of the flick feel like a bad morning zoo radio show with the blasts of noise that don’t really belong. I’m just not sure what Hughes was going for. I hate random sound effects unless they are used incredibly tactfully or cleverly. And they aren’t here.

3.0

The final score: review Bad

The 411

I’m not trying to be some movie critic hero here, but this movie just doesn’t play well in 2025. I thought I was settling in for a fun 80’s comedy romp from a classic director I have liked in the past, but what I got was a heaping helping of casual racism, a frightfully unsavory second main character, and a bunch of attempts at humor that crash into the tarmac. This was a downright unpleasant watch.