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JOHN HUGHES'S 'BREAKFAST CLUB' By Janet Maslin FIVE kids spending Saturday doing detention time in the high school library: it's not such a spine-tingling situation. But in ''The Breakfast Club,'' which he wrote and directed, John Hughes lets the kids challenge, taunt and confront each other as if this were ''Twelve Angry Men.'' Personalities are dissected; tears are shed. The kids, each representing a different teen stereotype, come to understand each other. They strike up friendships. They denounce their parents. They decide that ''when you grow up, your heart dies.'' The offhand, knowing humor of Mr. Hughes's ''Sixteen Candles'' is supplanted here by a deadly self-importance, occasionally leavened with a well-timed gag or a memorable bit of teenage slang. (''Yo, Waste-oid! You're not gonna blaze up in here,'' says one character, meaning ''Don't smoke.''). Fortunately, Mr. Hughes retains some of his earlier playfulness, and all of his talent for casting. There are some good young actors in ''The Breakfast Club,'' though a couple of them have been given unplayable roles. Ally Sheedy, for instance, must do what she can with the part of an uncommunicative psycho who reveals herself to be a compulsive liar, then changes radically by the time the story is over. None of this is credible, but Miss Sheedy still manages to be appealing. Judd Nelson is in a much worse spot as the hoodlum in the group, since Mr. Hughes's screenplay makes him the story's only aggressor. He can't help but get on the other characters' nerves, and on the audience's, too. Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, reunited after ''Sixteen Candles,'' are the movie's standout performers as an affluent prima donna and a boy who cares about physics to the exclusion of all else. As the athlete who rounds out this predictable lineup, Emilio Estevez has an edgy physical intensity very reminiscent of his father, Martin Sheen. The five young stars would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter-group candor towards which ''The Breakfast Club'' forces them. Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone. |