a preachy self-important mess

Rating: 4/10 (20 October 2000)

I disagree very strongly with most of the people on this board. It seems strange that I despise this movie with such venom while other people hold it up as a perfect piece of work. Maybe my standards are higher. Maybe I've seen so many movies that I can see cliches more clearly than most. Maybe I expected more from a film with an ambition to change the world. Maybe I'm feeling disappointment because it failed so completely.
I think "American History X" is a complete waste of your time. This is the story of a neo-Nazi named Derek who repents and gets out of prison just in time to save his kid brother Danny, who is going down the same skinhead path. That's the whole story. Everything else is atmosphere and complication, with sermons at every turn. I can understand why the director wanted to remove his name from the picture.
Likewise, I can understand why Edward Norton was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Derek, the jailbird brother. Norton is one of our best actors and squeezes lots of blood from this stone of a production. His speech rhythms and body language are wonderful. However, I can't find anything else to recommend apart from Norton's performance. The script is preachy, predictable, simplistic and badly staged. Edward Furlong is useless as Danny the baby skinhead, and the annoying fat guy who blabbers Nazi platitudes is one of the worst actors I have ever seen in a major motion picture. The black-and-white flashback device would be laughable in a film school thesis, and it's embarrassing to see it used here. It took all my strength to stomach the scene at the end where the brothers slowly remove all the Nazi propaganda from Danny's bedroom wall in ultra-dramatic fashion. This is an amateurish production of a bad screenplay that didn't think itself through.
I didn't believe anything that happened here. Why are all the neo-Nazi punks dressed so impeccably? Shouldn't they be lower-class kids wearing hand-me-downs and thrift store bargains? Maybe there would be a few trust-fund lads around, but the whole crowd of Nazi youth looks like they shop at the Gap and J. Crew. We find out that Derek experienced a trauma in prison, and are expected to believe not only that this event completely changed him, but also that Danny would make an immediate character switch as soon as he hears about Derek's prison experience. I didn't buy it, and why should I? This movie thinks I am stupid enough to believe anything I see without questioning it. And isn't that why we have neo-Nazis to begin with?
Don't believe the hype. Leave "American History X" to rot, and rent something interesting like "Do The Right Thing" or "Taxi Driver."