The high score reviews here must be based in viewings of this film in the very distant past. Because, despite its reputation as a buddy movie that reveals the workings, fears and desires of four teenage male friends, on a long journey to find and report finding a dead body, this mawkishly dull and emotionally flat four-gander features only bland acting, cringey dialogue and depth-of-character more often found in Disney movies relegated to Sunday afternoon viewing. I hate to rain in anyone's parade, or to diss anyone's find memories, but I didn't remember this as being even partly worth of all the hype when I first saw it in the late 80s and, we'll, time has not been kind to it. There's maybe five minutes of fascination in recognising the 'stellar' cast as only kids, but in truth none of them comes of of it too well. Blindfolded or reduced to a half-hour slot it would be impossible to distinguish this from an episode of The Wonder Years or some other moral-dripping slice of small-town nostalgia. 'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.'
Review of Stand by Me
