Ferris Bueller’s Day Off review

Musing one morning that ‘life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,’ young Ferris Bueller (Broderick) decides to skip school and, because it’s his ninth absent day so he won’t be able to have another without getting into major trouble, aims to make this one count. With the reluctant help of pal Cameron (Alan Ruck, who at thirty is surprisingly convincing playing a teen), Ferris ‘borrows’ Cameron’s father’s beloved Ferrari and heads for downtown Chicago, where he scams his way into a fancy restaurant, catches a game at Wrigley Field and, in one of the movie’s most unforgettable scenes, performs the Beatles’ ‘Twist and Shout’ during a town parade.

It’s all deliciously good fun as the teens get to break the rules while the adults are given short shrift (Jeffrey Jones’s school principal providing the laughs as he is foiled again by Ferris) and Broderick has never been better than as the good-natured, irrepressible teen we all wish we had known at school. A classic, funny and absolutely unmissable teen movie.

A quickly cancelled spin-off TV series Ferris Bueller was made in 1990, with Charlie Schlatter as Ferris and a young pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston as his disapproving sister.