Some things I liked some I did not.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Brilliant and touching

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The very last scenes of this movie deal a lot with the subject of a "pyrrhic victory." And that's a very appropriate bit of reflection, because this movie does present what seems to me to be a classic "pyrhhic victory" - where the battle is won, but at an outrageous and unjustifiable cost.When this started I was expecting it to be a pretty formulaic type of movie - following what in some ways has become a very tired formula. How many stories have their been about the dedicated teacher who goes into a troubled school full of seemingly hopeless kids and manages somehow to turn everything around. I can date the formula back as far as the 1960's with "To Sir With Love." There may well be earlier examples; that's just the earliest example I can think of. Here, the teacher is Trevor Garfield, played by Samuel L. Jackson. As the movie opens, Garfield is teaching at a troubled school in Brooklyn, and ends up getting knifed by a student he was going to fail. Surviving that attack, he moves to Los Angeles and becomes a substitute teacher, whose assignment is at an even more violent high school, where of course he becomes their target. The formula seems to be working its way out through the character of Rita, whom Garfield begins to tutor and who become more and more confident as a result. So far - nothing especially shocking or original. You figure you know how this is going to end. Except that it doesn't end that way. It ends with a classic "pyrhhic victory." Garfield, indeed, motivates Rita (who ends up addressing the graduating class on the subject of - guess what - pyrhhic victories. But the cost involved with motivating her is huge - Garfield first loses his soul in a way, descending to the level of his troubled, violent students, and then eventually loses his life. In the end, unlike most teachers in this kind of movie, Garfield isn't a figure you either sympathize with or admire.So, it's different from most of these kinds of movies. That spark of originality - which, once it began, threw me - is worth some credit to Scott Yagemann, a former Los Angeles high school teacher who wrote the script. But that spark of originality (that variation from the formula) didn't save this movie for me. It was OK, but nothing more than that. One thing that threw me was that it suffered from what most "high school" movies suffer from - actors who just look too old for the part. These just didn't look like high school kids to me. Take Rita, for example. She was played by an actress named Karina Arroyave - who would have been in her mid-late 20's when this was made. That's the same age range as Clifton Collins, who played Cesar - one of the main protagonists among the male students. I realize that they couldn't very well use high school age actors and actresses - Arroyave has a nude scene - but it took away a bit from the realism of the story. As, by the way, did that nude scene. Not so much that it happened. I could understand a suspicious Rita assuming that since Garfield had invited her to his home for tutoring, what he really wanted was something else. It just, to me, didn't make sense that Garfield would be naive enough to invite a female student to his home.If Scott Yagemann based this at all on his own experiences as a teacher, then it's certainly a grim picture of life in inner city LA schools - and the closing captions presented a sobering picture of the problem of student violence against teachers. Still, though, I didn't find it an especially great movie - although it did capture perfectly the essence of the "pyrhhic victory." (5/10)

OK, so this is not going to be Lean on Me with Morgan Freeman or even Dangerous Minds released just a year earlier. It's much darker and I have no problem with a film not following a conventional plot, in fact, I encourage it. But what should have ended as a halfway thought-provoking film fails miserably with a script and dialogue so paper thin you could shred it and horrible acting throughout from just about everyone except Samuel Jackson and John Heard. Also, for a drama film based on reality, there are some unbelievable circumstances throughout. For example, if a teacher was to appear in court as a material witness against a student who committed a crime, do you really think public school administrators would allow the student and teacher to stay at the same school, more less the same dang class?! And yet the principal of the school is always overly sensitive to the possibility that any student-teacher conflict could cause a lawsuit. Yet nobody thought to advise him on how bad of an idea that was? Someone tell me the logic in this.Anyway, the ending will leave you scratching your head while your jaw is still hanging throughout the long ending. You'll be thinking "What just happened?" Was there a lesson learned? Did this ending (or film) have a point; a story to tell? Yes, it does. The story is: There is a reason why this film has been forgotten while great films like Dangerous Minds and Lean on Me have not. Spare yourself the misery.

A powerful story about urban violence and how it can affect inner city schools, this is an excellent little film. Samuel L. Jackson shines as the teacher fed up with his class who eventually begins exact his own kind of justice by bumping off the problem pupils. An atmosphere of simmering violence is built up along with a lot of suspense in a tale that had me hooked. The reliable Jackson puts in an excellent performance as the bitter teacher who has been driven to the edge.The rest of the cast do their jobs well, especially the actors playing the loathsome pupils. What I liked best about this film was the surprising ending, which sees Jackson and his adversaries playing Russian Roulette round a table. A superb ending to what is an interesting, sometimes difficult to watch but still important film. Forget the watered-down crap that most television stations show, this is raw, forceful viewing which asks questions. In fact it reminded me of some of those gritty '70s films, as it has the same hard edge.

At the end of 1960s the ideal teacher faced his students' disturbance by good understanding and sympathy, then at the 1990s became the only way for the ideal teacher to face his students' savagery is a more wild savagery. So it's not (To Sir With Love) anymore...It's (The Count of Monte Cristo) or (Psycho) ! (187) is the satirical movie in a form of a horror, or it's the case of our nightmare factual life already, or maybe it's one of the most melancholic "what if" movies ever. But anyway its highest point was that concept of (meet violence with violence) whereas the chaos will bring nothing but chaos, the blood which leads to more blood, and the ultimate havoc will be definitely for the both sides (The teacher and the student) as long as the previous side (the system) is absolute free at decision and insanity ! This is the message of this movie, its good premonition, and its discrete antecedence despite its own exaggerations and its too melodramatic ending.Actually (Kevin Reynolds) made solid, turbid, and dismal atmosphere out of this story by using a lot of elements to express such a dreadful experience. For instance you'll find so many red (blood) and blue (grief) all over the screen, or varies between sick yellow and gloomy black with a hot image in a sweat all the time like they're all (teacher and students) in one cell and no one will let the other live, but that desire was importunate to the extent that you may feel – especially with the drastic events and that Russian roulette's end ! – That the movie nearly sunk under it. Although I believe that not all the movies must be dreamy with happy ending but I believe also that the exaggeration of a message can powerfully destroy it, so I think the main problem here is that the well meaning statement became unintentionally overstatement.