All the Right Moves [Blu-ray] [1983] [US Import]

In one of his early films which started to bring him to prominence, Tom Cruise plays a high school senior football player who has to come to terms with a plethora of teenage angst, love, sex, football, pregnancy, crime, jealousy and revenge.

Stefan Djordevic lives in a nameless Pennsylvania town where two things seem to dominate life there. There's the huge grinding steelworks which employs the majority of the population and the high school football team, which for the players at least seems to offer a way out of this bleak town. Stef knows with some good performances in the few remaining games of the football season he should be offered a football scholarship to a good university where he can not only play football, but study engineering which is his main dream. This idea of escape seems to be shared by Stef's girlfriend Lisa Litski (Lea Thompson) who having her own dream of making music scholarship rails at the idea that the more academically challenged "jocks" will make it to university on the back of their sporting skills whilst she realises a life working in the convenience store of her hometown probably awaits.

Someone else who sees the rest of his life away from the high school is the football coach Nickerson (Craig T. Nelson) who imagines a career coaching a college team somewhere else. When after loosing the all important game against their local rivals Stef accuses Nickerson of being a quitter, Nickerson drops Stef from the team and scuppers his chances of a scholarship. To make matters worse Stef then takes part in some mindless vandalism of the coach's house which would seem to give the coach the green light to "black ball" Stef to every college he knows.

The film looks at all these happenings with the intensity and importance that only the young can give to these situations. There's part of me that simply doesn't believe that the nigh on abusive coaching methods employed on such young people actually goes on in high schools, but no doubt to those that are playing it seems every bit as extreme. Likewise the way the Stef comes to terms with the other problems in his life are seen through the eyes of a teenager, so for example, when one of the team is arrested for armed robbery, the players and their girlfriends raise a toast to him in his absence at their next party, when surely a more rounded attitude would be to think of the consequences this criminal's activities could have had on the people he stole from. But who ever claims that the views of the young were rounded.

In this sense the film is very good because is selfishly concentrates on Stef's issues. The film introduces a few other strands of plot, Lisa's college dreams and the pregnancy issue that Stef's best friend his girl find themselves in but we never really get any closure on these, and in many ways I guess this is like a typical teenager's attitude that the world revolves around them.

The film has a very gritty and murky feel to it, there's much use of damp and muddy fields and the steaming machinery of the steel works to prove how tough life is and how important the dreams of escape are. For all the awful 80's fashions and the cheesey 80's soundtrack this film could be enjoyed by teens today as it was when it was released.

A very young Tom Cruise puts in a good performance, in a film, which lacks a true story line and does really rely on him. His character a young college American football player. Who wants nothing more than to succeed as a engineer and playing football is his way to get a scholarship and removing his nightmare of been stuck working in the dingy steelworks in the local town.
This is deffently worth watching but i wouldnt rush out to but it