The plot of The Goonies may not win any awards for originality, but that doesn’t stop it being a great example of the classic case of the evil business man who will bulldoze the homes of a group of kids and their families in order to build a golf course, or shopping mall or something, unless the parents can come up with an unfeasible amount of money to stop him. I forget exactly what the developer wants to build in this case, but it doesn’t matter as you’ve no doubt seen this plot a thousand times before. The kids, who call themselves the Goonies, find a treasure map supposedly leading to the horde of pirate One Eyed Willy. They decide to follow the map in a last ditch effort to save their homes.
Where The Goonies excels in telling this story is the wide variety of the misfit characters who work together to save their homes, the convincing back story, and the second set of evil comedy villains, the Fratellis, who follow the Goonies trying to claim the treasure for themselves. Everything gels together perfectly, as you would expect from a film that had Steven Spielberg, Richard Donner and Chris Columbus (no, not the explorer) behind it.