God bless Edward Norton...

Rating: 5/10 (28 July 2003)

...and God grant him a less grandstanding, more subtle director than Tony Kaye, who has piled cliché on top of cliché in this diatribe against neo-Nazism and poured on the anti-racist moralizing as if he had invented the concept. You want faux-home movies of kids at the shore to symbolize lost innocence? You got it. Slow-motion violence? Check. Black-and-white flashbacks to contrast against the blood-spattered color of the present-day sequences? Why not. Pseudo-religious, semi-liturgical musical scoring to mythologize and elegize the predictable dramatics? It's dripping with it. The kind of rote plotting that demands one character will have to be sacrificed for the sins of another? That's here, too. The storytelling is resolutely episodic, a series of (predictable) set pieces: the basketball court confrontation, the convenience-store riot (which is admittedly frightening stuff), the prison gang-rape, the neo-Nazi rally. It's all prosaically told, but Norton does create a complex portrait out of little, carefully conveying Derek's anger, conflicting familial feelings, fierce protectiveness, and growing consciousness. Some very good veteran actors help out -- Beverly D'Angelo, Elliott Gould, Stacy Keach -- and Avery Brooks somehow manages to turn his angelic-teacher turn into more than a device. God knows a subject this timely and vital deserves more nuance and analysis, but the brute force of Norton's acting and the excellent support from little-brother Furlong (though Kaye, predictably again, lingers too long and in too-relentless closeup on all that anguished doe-eyed adolescence) ultimately win out over ham-fisted direction and unimaginative screen writing.