Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
I wonder if the success of this film felt any different to John Hughes than his other hits. In a career of doubles and triples, this is his only home run—an out-of-the-ballpark home run, at that. This is the best thing he ever did.
There are many things that make this so delightful but its ingenious structure has to be among its strongest assets. The movie has a pretty elastic sense of time (it’s unclear how anyone can fit in a visit to the art museum, a gourmet lunch, a baseball game, a guest appearance on a parade float, and more into a single day while just beating your parents back to the house) that’s draped around a couple of really entertaining subplots and recurring bits. Jeffrey Jones’s Ed Rooney is the best of these; his performance as a vindictive, perpetual loser on an epic quest is a marvel of comic villainy. But the periodic near misses with Ferris’s parents also add so much hilarious tension throughout the day; they’re doled out with such strategic grace it feels almost like comedic music. In fact that’s perhaps the best way to think about this frankly fantastical, implausible movie that almost feels like it’s all just an idle daydream of one of the three lead characters; it’s less of a plot-driven narrative than a kind of pop song about teenage empowerment.
My 11-year old twins really enjoyed it too.
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