Goonies Never… Something…

In recent months there have been rumors that a sequel to The Goonies was in production. Those were rumors, of course, and most of those rumors were false. Years and years of rumors, in fact, had piled up over time as one cast member or another stated they would love to come back, if only the talks around a sequel could ever be firmed up. Last report had it in February of 2025 that a script had been commissioned and maybe, just maybe, that long in development sequel would finally get the true green light.

Now, I wouldn’t hold my breath on it. Projects like this come up and then fizzle out more often than not. While Chris Columbus (who directed the first one) is attached as a producer, along with Amblin Entertainment and the Donner company, that doesn’t mean that anything will come of this yet. In Hollywood, a film isn’t truly done and ready for release until it’s in the can (and even then, if Zazlav has his way, a finished movie can still be shelved, never to see the light of day). But with these rumors swirling once again, it felt like a good time to go back and look at the original The Goonies, to see if the magic is still there.

And of course it doesn’t, but I don’t think that’s really a flaw of the film, per se. When I was eight, catching this film on basic cable, the film felt magical. Of course it would, it’s meant for kids of a certain age, giving them their own Indiana JonesTapping into the classic serial adventures of the 1940s, this franchise has gone on to spawn five films, multiple video games, a TV series, and so many novels and books.-esque adventure without adding in too much horror (while keeping just enough of the naughty stuff that kids found amusing). I’m no longer eight (far from it) and the same magic that I felt as a kid isn’t there for me because I don’t relate to the kids on screen the way I used to. I’m not annoyed by them being kids and going on an adventure, but I do recognize that I think about what they’re doing and where they’re going differently now than I did then.

Of course, I also see the flaws in the script and that doesn’t help. A kid can ignore (or not even notice) bad storytelling and underwritten characters in a way that adults too frequently can’t. And, to paraphrase Norman Osborn, I’m something of a writer myself and I just can’t truly get past all the flaws I see in The Goonies. I’m sure if I had a kid and I showed it to them they’d be entranced (that or they’d tell me to take my dumb old movie away because they wanted to watch TikTok or play Roblox or whatever it is eight year olds do now). It just doesn’t hold up for me the way it once could.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the movie, but let’s cover the basics. A housing development is about to be foreclosed on so that the rich people in the town of Astoria, OR, can expand their country club grounds. This forces the families living there to pack up and prepare to leave, but their kids don’t want to let go so easily. The group of pre-teens – Sean Astin as Michael "Mikey" Walsh, Jeff Cohen as Lawrence "Chunk" Cohen, Corey Feldman as Clark "Mouth" Devereaux, and Ke Huy Quan as Richard "Data" Wang – find an old treasure map lurking in the attic of Mikey’s house, along with an old medallion, and they decide to follow the map and see where it leads.

Why? Because there’s a legend of an old pirate captain, One-Eyed Willy (yes, it’s a dick joke), who used to sail the coast off Oregon. Supposedly he had a massive ship full of treasure, but when his men tried to rebel and steal it from the captain, Willy killed them all. Somewhere, deep in the caves of the coast, it’s said that Willy’s ship remains and whoever can find it could have all his treasure. So the boys set out to get it, but they have just two small matters to contend with. One is Mikey’s older brother, Brand (Josh Brolin), who has to keep an eye on him and will get in trouble if Mikey goes wandering off into dangerous caves alone. The other is the Fratellis – Anne Ramsey as Mama Fratelli, and Robert Davi and Joe Pantoliano as her two sons, Jake and Francis – escaped cons out looking for a score that caught wind of the treasure and will do anything to get it. Can Mikey and his friends find Willy’s treasure, or will they end up like Willy, buried deep at the bottom of the caves?

The Goonies is predicated on a lot of logic leaps that don’t really hold up when you think about them. For instance, why is there a treasure map and a medallion to use with the map located in Mikey’s attic? Well, just because. Don’t ask how it got there, or how the guy that made the map and found the medallion originally (who we see later died in the caves years before) ended up losing those very specific items that he, likely, would have been using when he died. Also don’t ask why no one else went looking for the treasure, or how a massive pirate ship sitting in an open cavern wasn’t easily discovered by just about any archaeologist over the last one hundred years or so. None of that matters because it doesn’t fit into the bounds of this story.

This is a story about kids on an adventure, and adult logic doesn’t really apply. What you have to remember is that this is basically a kid’s version of Indiana Jones, and that means the adventure has to get handed to the kids somehow, in this case via a lost map they stumble on, and they have to navigate a series of traps before finding the treasure. Oh, and they won’t get to keep the treasure, not all of it, because that would change them. The real treasure, as they say, is the adventure they had along the way.

In that respect the film plays out. It has the same sense of awe and wonder as you’d get from Indiana Jones films, just filtered through the lens of a bunch of preteens. Thus jokes about penises are scattered throughout. There’s a bit of other crude humor and blue language used as well, because these are kids and they’re going to talk like kids. Really, the film feels pretty realistic when it comes to how the kids act, especially when they’re by themselves and just having fun on their adventure. That fun is palpable and it’s a big reason why the film is still watchable all these years later.

With that said, the film isn’t as tight as it could be. It opens with a very long first act that not only establishes the kids, and the situation with their homes, and the map, and the locations around town, and the Fratellis, and… yeah, it’s a lot. It’s so much that it eats up a ton of the 114 minute runtime, leaving far less time for the actual adventure. Mikey warns his friends, as they dive into the cave system, that there will be traps aplenty and so many dangers they’ll have to look out for. And then they hit, maybe, two big traps in total. It’s a lot of build up for what ends up being a relatively short and not that difficult adventure.

And that leads back to the big issue with the story: if these kids were able to do it, why couldn’t anyone else. There was plenty of time after Willy’s ship went missing for people to go digging around. We know of just one guy that actually tried and then… nothing. The kids did it in a night and all they needed was a map and the medallion. It’s hard to believe no one else could have done it in all that time. The film never really has a good explanation for it beyond, “they just never tried,” and it feels kind of weak.

Plus, because the actual adventure is so short it feels like the film ends just as it was really starting to build momentum. Admittedly, by the time the film ends I was more or less done with the characters. They’re a bunch of preteens that I liked back in the day but find kind of tiresome now. The Fratellis are worse, mind you, as they’re written like cartoon characters (and the film treats them with cartoon logic as well) so the sooner I’m done with them, the better. Still, the film could use some balancing to fix pacing issues and obvious plotholes.

But that’s nitpicking a classic film meant for an audience I’m no longer part of. That’s fine. This film does exactly what it needs to do and it does it pretty well. It’s still a fun and lighthearted kids adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones, with plenty of humor, thrills, and spills. It might not play for me the way it used to, but that doesn’t make it bad. It just means this film is ready for the next generation so they can join Mikey and his pals on their own adventure. And should a sequel ever come to pass, I’m sure it’ll open this film up for more generations to come as well.

The Goonies isn’t perfect but it worked really well for the time it was released and for the generation that got to love it. I think that’s a perfect legacy for this fun, little film.