Review #156: 'Uncle Buck' (1989)

Having recently re-located from Indianapolis to Chicago, Bob Russell (Garrett M. Brown) is awoken in the middle of the night to the news that his father-in-law has had a heart attack. He and his wife Cindy (Elaine Bromka) must leave urgently and must need to someone to babysit their two young children Miles (Macauley Culkin) and Maizy (Gaby Hoffmann), and their angst-ridden teenage daughter Tia (Jean Louisa Kelly). Everyone seems to be unavailable, and they are forced to call Bob's brother Buck (John Candy), an overweight, lazy, jobless slob who is more than happy to his brother a favour.

Perhaps one of John Hughes' lesser remembered films (compared to the likes of The Breakfast Club (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and Weird Science (1985)), it is also one of his underrated. While hardly reaching the heights of Breakfast and Bueller, it is still warm, nostalgic, and funny enough in its own right. As formulaic as the film is, Hughes' nack for the heartfelt sets it apart from the other similar films. And although he made very few films that were good enough to show his comedic ability, it reminded me just how funny and loveable John Candy could be before his unfortunate death (a sentence I never thought I would say/type).

The character of Tia has to be one of the most annoying characters in a Hughes movie since Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles (1984). She is selfish, selt-pitying, and quite frankly, a bitch. This is clearly the point but I was just wishing Buck would get it over and done with and give her a good beating, rather than trying to 'understand' all this teen angst crap.

It does allow for a very funny scene involving Buck kidnapping her two-timing boyfriend. An arsehole of a character getting hit in the head with a golf ball is always a winner in my book. And over a decade before Austin Powers made fun of a mole, Uncle Buck delivers possibly one of the best lines of the 80's - (to a stuffy teacher claiming his niece is a 'bad egg') "take this quarter, go downtown, and have a rat gnaw that thing off your face!". Even though the film threatens to be ruined by an embarrassingly unrealistic and cheesy ending, this is still a fun film. And one I remember fondly from my childhood when I watched it religiously on VHS, after my granddad purchased it from my father's record shop, uttering the immortal line "a-we're buying it" (private joke between me and my brother so apologies everyone else).


Directed by: John Hughes
Starring: John Candy, Jean Louisa Kelly, Gaby Hoffmann, Macauley Culkin, Amy Madigan
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie