Ferris Bueller's Day Off
First screened way later than you'd think / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: John Hughes. Cast: Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones, Jennifer Grey, Cindy Pickett, Lyman Ward, Edie McClurg, Ben Stein, Virginia Capers, Kristy Swanson, Richard Edson, Charlie Sheen, Max Perlich, Scott Coffey, DeeDee Rescher. Screenplay: John Hughes. In Brief:
Proof that an utterly blank hero, flat sidekicks, and kneejerk adolescent anomie can hit big and endure!
VOR:③
I may be unimpressed, and challenged to see much originality or risk, but the movie has persisted for four decades, and that isn't nothing.
“Save Ferris” from what, exactly? Also, who is Ferris? Part of the deal in popular entertainment, especially in teen comedies, is leaving a protagonist sufficiently nonspecific to invite affinity and investment from as broad a swath as possible of the potential audience. But there's strategic generality and then there's blithe non-entity, which is what we get here—a folk hero by virtue of being nobody and doing precious little, despite an entire city and mysteriously unlimited means to play with. A rumored hero and pet to his peers, but one who only crosses paths with two actual peers and isn’t an obvious supernova of charisma. One of the improbably immortal lines in this durable cultural touchstone is nothing but a zoned-out roll call: “Bueller? Bueller?” I get why! Ben Stein is basically perfect in two short scenes as a history teacher a hundred miles from connecting with his students. Without any sense of flexing, and in fact by doing the opposite, Stein does a lot with so little, which some other folks also manage from the sidelines of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The problem is that the lead character and the writer-director do so little with a lot, so much so that I'm still asking, “Bueller? Bueller?” after seeing the film twice. Ferris gets a day off from his own movie, which mostly plays as a day off from itself.
This wasn't inevitable, especially given the film's strong start. Ferris’s direct-to-camera address makes adroit use of Matthew Broderick’s vanilla bean charm and his soft sell of facetious dialogue, stopping short of crabby sarcasm. It feels like a good thing that Ferris’s elaborate engineering of a sick day and his goal-free, quasi-religious adherence to truancy are pitched such that we're equally primed to cheer him along or to anticipate some comeuppance. Maybe, with any luck, a little of both. There’s also some humor in the prologue’s brisk nods to how parents’ craving for affirmation from their kids can make them real dupes and how siblings, especially sisters, can build an identity out of resenting baldly preferential treatment, especially of brothers. The actors playing the other Buellers, especially Jennifer Grey as acidic sister Jean, are deft short-order cooks of the simple dishes they're asked to serve up, and it's always good when comedies give themselves a deep pool of personalities to draw on. Disgraced character actor Jeffrey Jones and 80s stalwart Edie McClurg swiftly expand that pool with their funny sketches of a disdainful principal and his chirpy administrator. Sure, it may not be the brightest bellwether that Alan Ruck shows a less light touch as Cameron, Ferris’s morose friend and co-conspirator. Or that Mia Sara, as Ferris’s girlfriend and happy conscript in self-absconding, has a fetching, slightly older-than-her-years look but projects nothing close to a mind or a personality. But good flicks have survived worse than drab or effortful teammates, and as Cameron proves right away, a tag-team can pull off forms of mischief that a single scalawag couldn't.
Unfortunately, at the exact stage when Ferris Bueller should lift off from all this scene-setting, with our three compadres speeding toward downtown in a red Ferrari, it comes close to just leveling out. Hughes has showed up at his desk with decent supplies and studied enough for a confident pass but then banks on the test just taking itself. Ferris & Co. go to the Sears Tower, a pricey French restaurant, a baseball game, and the Art Institute before he, alone, climactically hops onto a street parade float to get his boogie on. That's more than enough action for a big Day Off but not the right action. For one, this is an itinerary your most basic middle-aged relative would pick for your first trip to Chicago after living here for 3-6 weeks. Fair enough, these suburban kids may have a vague, all-but-touristy sense of the neighboring metropolis, but Hughes shouldn't. I'd bet anything that Sloane, she of the luxe, fringed, white leather jacket, wants to window shop on Michigan, and that Ferris or Cameron wants a hot dog, and that any of them might gravitate to some record shops, or Rush Street, or funky cool-kid Wicker Park. I have no sense any of them cares about baseball or painting, or that Ferris, at least, wants anything to do with haute cuisine. That scene only exists so that he can be a dick to the host and waiter, with Sloane and Cameron imploring him to cool it. Cameron's still panicking about leaving the car, or staying gone too long. Both try to keep Ferris off that float as it passes, and they walk several blocks away when he resists them.
It's rarely a great dynamic when your two key supporting players are repeatedly nagging the lead to stop the film from happening. It's worse when the writer-director keeps strangling scenes in their cradle. Hughes couldn't think of any way to have fun with the cross-class, too-invested crowds at Wrigley Field? Or with the labyrinth of the museum, the shushed seriousness of its patrons, or the comic indifference or incomprehension of our callow protagonists? He couldn't do anything visually with the Sears Tower beyond one memorable Tak Fujimoto image of foreheads on glass? He thinks these teens want to eat where he wants to eat?
On that last point, I guess Hughes was actually the wiser, albeit too late. He filmed a scene where Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron are grossed out by what they order at Chez Quis, but cut it. So, that scene's a buildup and an exit with no middle. And for the record, I don't blame the buddies for sliding away from Ferris during “Twist and Shout.” That routine helpfully boosts the energy and the editing of the movie, and betrays Hughes's late-onset recognition that a crazy quilt of everyday Chicagoans will give his camera more to work with than Sloane or Cameron has managed. Still, while Matthew Broderick may be many things—okay, perhaps a couple of things, or one and a half things—a livewire or hype man is decidedly not one of them. His erratic movement and loose singalong to “Twist and Shout” suggest a good-faith star trying to give the director and the scene what they need. But he is defiantly what he is: a baby marshmallow with the heat turned up just enough to pass as a S’more.
The biggest enigma and disappointment isn't that Hughes can't devise more inventive, age-appropriate Chicago locations and can't better exploit the ones he's chosen but that he never gets beneath Ferris's or Sloan's or Cameron's skin. In scripts like Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, or especially The Breakfast Club, he exercises his rightly lauded gift of giving teenagers spirit and dimension without letting them off the hook for brattiness, dubious choices, even embracing cliché. But in Ferris Bueller, the characters are as anonymous as the bullet-pointed but barely explored list of famous Windy City sites. These three could almost be anywhere. They rarely talk or laugh about anything, and little is revealed when they do. They neither inhabit nor engage nor antagonize their ports of call, and they are unchanged by anyone or anything they encounter, or by each other. They fail to become anyone new or more specific as their film unfurls, yet that failure isn't advanced as the point.
You can take exception to Hughes’s other movies, but he rarely seemed this apathetic toward his characters as personalities, or toward their roiling feelings. In this way, Ferris Bueller is closer in spirit to later Hughes scripts like Home Alone. Ferris is as dogged about fleeing his house as Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin is about defending his, involving in both cases contraptions aplenty but no soul.
In the Careful What You Wish For department, though, Hughes seems belatedly to recognize this lack of stakes or emotional drama. Thus, in Bueller’s third and worst act, he steers Cameron—not his lead, which itself is so odd—into high Oedipal dudgeon against a father we never see. That absence makes Dad all the easier a target for one of Hughes’s rote diatribes against suffocating or out-of-touch adults. (This is the inverted mirror of stating but never showing that Ferris is the consensus cool guy in his school.) But Cameron’s cri de coeur, in theme and in tone, comes from virtually nowhere, as did the brief interlude of maybe-suicidal catatonia that preceded it, and nobody knows how to manage either of them. Ruck isn't fully up for the expressive challenge of communicating all this, whatever it signifies. Broderick and Sara just stand nearby, wide-eyed and uncomprehending. Even the camera gets stuck in a series of static, ungainly frames inside the garage where Bueller has suddenly dropped anchor. A movie that has criminally over-relied on dull reaction shots serves up more of them, often in response to equally blank reactions, and with each actor looking understandably unsure of what's even going on.
This painfully long, unearned sequence is like one of those Fassbinder passages where all the characters freeze into a diorama of inaction and inhibition, except there’s no art or context to this one. Plus, it's hard to get away with raging in broad strokes against your parents when in some ways you have already turned into them: all this money, all this free time and cosmopolitan access, and no idea what to do with them. Equally unconvincing are the banal late-film speeches about how much our trio will miss each other after the boys both graduate and Sloane, I guess, gets put back in her box or her Dreamhouse—not when an entire day’s outing has failed to coax out any palpable bond among them. Broderick, to his credit, proved able to establish some rapport with the audience in about ten early minutes of breaking the fourth wall but has failed to do the same with his actual costars over the next 90 minutes. And Hughes, who vowed while promoting Ferris Bueller that he wrote it in just six days and basically shot that draft, loudly collides with the limits of everything he hasn't thought through, or even asked. The sloppiness is amazing: i.e., is Jean older than Ferris, as she constantly seems to be, despite still attending the school he's about to graduate as a senior? Worse is the failure to supply a third act or to make any contact with something like hot emotion, which is what teen films typically thrive on whether or not they have any inspiration, much less any ideas.
I should correct myself, though, since Ferris Bueller isn't emotionless, and it isn't without ideas. There's plenty of feeling coursing off of Jones as the Javert-like principal, whose determination to wreak vengeance on the titular layabout/tyrant keeps ratcheting up till it hits stalkerish extremes. That's discomfiting but it's something. Is that why he, too, has to disappear for the last half-hour? Granted, Hughes isn't the man to make a movie about how or why adults dislike their children, or the kids for whom they're professionally responsible. Still, he gets better action, clearer portraiture, and funnier punchlines from Jones and from McClurg, maybe because he doesn't see them as his automatic wheelhouse, than he does from the adolescents for whom he too confidently positions himself as pop poet laureate. But even there, he has a good, peppery time with one of his teens: that's Jean, whom Grey plays energetically despite not getting to “do” much but carp. In fact, the one shimmer of brilliance in Hughes’s script is the long-game by which all of Jean’s petulant indictments of chauvinism prove 1,000% warranted: she ends the movie in trouble and even in jail, while the parents keep blowing air kisses at Ferris and heating him more soup.
There's your movie, or at least a movie: a 50/50 tale of the male scofflaw who keeps failing upward, whether playing hooky miles away or malingering in bed, while the dutiful, seething Cassandra, who may or may not be his twin, and who believes she has no right or leeway to behave as he does, gets rewarded for her lucidity (and for fighting off an intruder in her home!) by getting hauled in as a perp. If he'd written that script, I hope Hughes would have passed it to another director, as he often did. The guy who thinks Jean’s one kiss on a precinct bench with Charlie Sheen's filthy flameout would soften all of her well-earned hardness, or who steers the seemingly unimpressible Sloane into calling Ferris marriage material (having wisely demurred from his prior, idiotic proposals), probably isn't up to the challenge I'm setting.
So we're left with Ferris Bueller's Day Off as it is: an amiable distraction, an undisputed survivor in a constantly changing cultural landscape, but a case where popularity is no affidavit for being good. What bothers me most, even when I'm chuckling, is what a pretty dispiriting emblem this is of what people at any age want from a protagonist, or conceive as a rebellious break in routine. If your fantasy of day-long rule-breaking, your ninth try out of nine at smashing the glass ceiling of premature and inexplicably entitled ennui, involves forcing your way into a restaurant but not necessarily eating anything, shoving your way into a crowded stadium but only semi-following the game, touring a museum that is filmed mostly as a montage of canvases with you nowhere in sight, and trying to cheer your hangdog friend with a frenetic public performance from which he slowly walks away, I really want you to consider a bigger, better dream for yourself. Maybe it could involve taking a strawberry-red Ferrari you’ve been paid to park and protect for a 150-mile joyride, the second its little prick of an owner turns his back and leaves it in your care. That happens in Ferris Bueller, in the backgrounds of two shots and in one or two cutaways. Those two miscreants, one played by Do the Right Thing's Richard Edson, seemed like they had a great day doing something unlawful that they nonetheless really love. How about show me that movie and park Ferris in Shake Shack, or in Glencoe, on in detention, or wherever he belongs. Grade:C
(I posted this review simultaneously on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you'd like.)
