Mind blowingly brilliant drama

Rating: 10/10 (21 April 2010)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
After his fireman father is killed responding to a call in a black neighbourhood as a teenager, Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) takes his racist beliefs on board and becomes a hard core Neo Nazi skinhead and forms an allegiance with people with like minded beliefs. It all culminates one night when he uses brutally excessive force on two black criminals who try and rob his house, killing them and being sent to prison for a few years. Upon his release, he is a changed man and wants to distance himself from the life he once lead- unfortunately, his younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) appears to be heading down the same path, getting in trouble with school head master Dr. Sweeney (Avery Brooks) for writing an essay on 'Mein Kempth.' It's a race against time to direct him down the right path.
Most of the most respected and well known of actors burst on to the scene with some sort of springboard, some role that gained them recognition and got them tipped as a future star to watch out for. This, surely, was what served for Edward Norton. For his breath taking performance here is the sheer driving force of this amazing examination of the cancer of hatred and the violence and self destruction that evolves. There is a passion and raw intensity delivered from him, that makes it so good it in fact reduces Stephen Graham's crazed skinhead in This is England to a poor man's version of it. That assured delivery and natural screen presence is something he would make himself notable with in future roles such as 25th Hour, although there's probably plenty of others that others prefer. Furlong, Brooks, Stacey Keach and Beverley D'Angelo are solid support but the star of the show is really leading it here.
Tony Kaye has delivered an unflinching, shocking, emotionally draining film with a devastating and hopeless conclusion that serves as the real life denounement that there's rarely a happy ending. It set Norton on the path to super stardom and is one of the more shocking dramas out there. *****