Cheap melodrama.

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2004)

American History X is impressive for one reason: it is probably the only feel-good movie about neo-nazism in modern cinema. It's about a troubled young man named Derek (Edward Norton) who becomes a skinhead after some black men murder his father. He goes to prison for murdering two black men and leaves prison with a clearer view of the absurdities of the choices he made in the past. His younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) is already following his footsteps, with his head shaved and his bedroom decked in nazi posters; it is up to Derek to tell Danny about his past mistakes and to try to keep Danny from making them. Surprisingly, so little of this material is handled with any guts; there is only cheap melodrama (don't get me started about the use of slow-motion) and unnecessary preaching. Even when it tries to give us a tough ending, it feels stapled on. Also, notice that the only two charismatic and movie-star-like skinheads (Norton and Furlong) are the ones that director Tom Kaye (who later disowned the film) chose to portray? Wouldn't the film be more daring and interesting if it were a study of Seth Ryan (played horrifyingly by Ethan Suplee), Derek's fat, dumb, insanely angry bulldog friend? Norton is the most endearing and likable actor in Hollywood and to cast him as the skinhead that the film studies is too easy.
(Another problem with the film, character-wise, is that the characters are all, pretty much, cartoons and only in a film this problematic would this criticism be put in parentheses.)