Writer/director John Hughes was an icon of 1980s American cinema, thanks to a string of youth-oriented dramas and comedies. His films offered a fresh and contemporary take on suburban teenagers, albeit from a particularly white and Chicago-based point of view. Decades after their release, films like The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) continue to be popular favourites. Sadly the overwhelming commercial success of family comedy Home Alone (1990), which Hughes wrote and produced, led Hollywood’s key studios to demand more films of that style, and Hughes was forced to abandon his most creatively satisfying work.

Career Opportunities (1991) was the last of Hughes’ original run of youth films: put into production before Home Alone was released, it was directed by Bryan Gordon from a Hughes screenplay. The film stars Frank Whaley as a young unemployed dreamer hired to be the janitor of a local Target store – only to encounter both a beautiful runaway (Jennifer Connelly) and a pair of armed robbers (Dermot and Kieran Mulroney).

It is rather sad to see such an iconic run of films end on such a comparatively weak note. There is a degree of cynicism to Career Opportunities that was not present in Hughes’ earlier, more enjoyable comedies. Protagonist Jim Dodge, while played by Whaley in an engaging fashion, resembles a more downbeat variation of Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller. The film’s scope, which is mostly contained to a deserted Target department store in the middle of the night, feels considerably more modest. Connelly does her very best to infuse local beauty queen Josie McClennan with personality and warmth, but there is nothing really supporting her in the screenplay. At the same time, Bryan Gordon’s direction seems to abandon Connelly to serve as a teenage lust object: you would swear her cleavage requires its own screen credit. The Mulroneys’ arrival comes far too late into the film to function properly. It warps a traditional narrative out of alignment, lending the whole piece a rather patchy and unsatisfying air.

It is not all bad news. Whaley and Connelly give more enthusiastic performances that the writing and direction deserve, and the jokes that work do alleviate the film’s worst tendencies. It also boasts an enjoyable musical soundtrack: Hughes was always good at fostering strong selections of pop music, and here the 1980s sounds of his earlier productions give way to some definitively early 1990s artists.

Career Opportunities was a commercial failure upon release, with Hughes attempting to disown the project in advance. Ardent fans of Hughes’ oeuvre may find some satisfaction in seeing this more obscure and partially forgotten work, but that satisfaction is remarkably weak. The finished project is inescapably mediocre stuff.