Sixteen Candles

John Hughes’ directorial debut, Sixteen Candles follows teenager Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) as she attempts to overcome a series of obstacles and difficulties on the day she turns 16 – with Samantha’s troubles compounded by the realization that her entire family has forgotten about her birthday. Hughes, working from his own screenplay, does an expectedly stellar job of initially luring the viewer into the proceedings, as the filmmaker frontloads the picture with tremendously likable characters and an emphasis on scenes and sequences of an irresistibly engrossing nature. It’s only as the film moves into its episodic midsection that Sixteen Candles begins to lose its grip on the viewer, as the unabashedly plotless atmosphere results in a palpable lack of momentum that only grows more and more problematic as time progresses. And though the characters remain affable and compelling throughout – Ringwald’s star-making turn is, all these years later, just as potent as ever – Hughes’ lackadaisical sensibilities ensure that the movie does begin to demonstrably peter out somewhere around the half hour mark. By the time the anticlimactic and needlessly silly third act rolls around, Sixteen Candles has firmly established itself as a sporadically amusing yet hopelessly uneven endeavor that simply isn’t in the same league as Hughes’ later classics.

** out of ****