“I better start living up to that potential.”

Not to be labeled as a “guilty pleasure”, James Foley’s Reckless is a great example of ’80s teen melodrama done just right.

Foley directed the living fuck out of a so-so script, and he gave leading man cred to first-timer Aidan Quinn, who’d come to regard this as a breakthrough role way more than Daryl Hannah (she had already become a minor star with her Blade Runner turn and would hit the “wholesome temptress” note again the same year in Splash).

Lovely New Wave soundtrack is pushed front and center, with no less than three songs - Romeo Void’s Never Say Never, INXS’ The One Thing and Kim Wilde’s Kids In America, aka the score to the notorious pool scene - splitting the trailer into three acts: him, her, them.

Dialogue is wisely cut down to a few snippets - it works much better as a nonverbal sort of movie, with the score framing choice moments like this one.

Absent: the dreary industrial locations, which effectively set the mood for the film and lend it a much needed frame of reference.

Present: editing doesn’t quite show, but hints to the copious amounts of sex inside, which was pretty suggestive for its time and genre. After all, “being a teen-marketed piece of fluff” is not the same as “introducing a part of your demographic to the notion of having sex being on top”. Yeah, those were the GTs.