"Death Wish" for academia

Rating: 2/10 (6 September 2007)

It amazes me how easily people fall for cardboard characters. In real life, it would be impossible to find an educational institution so filled with boorish, vile teachers, and wimpish, intimidated students, with the exception of this one dazzling, inspiring professor. Real life doesn't work that way--no one is as perfect, or perfectly awful, as these people.
But that's not the point. The point is to set up superficial symbols of the prejudices of the audience (the stuffy conservative teachers, the heartlessly strict father, the violent jock), and knock them down with a feather, so that the audience can congratulate itself for its enlightened attitudes.
This is about what I'd expect from Robin Williams, who usually seems to gravitate to roles of this sort. However, other worthy actors fell into this trap, I hope only because a job's a job. Kurtwood Smith is known for playing another tough-guy father, but in "That 70s Show" he's a complex character. There, he's always threatening to "kick ass", but he's also capable of humor and love; here, he's a pathetic cartoon. But Robin Williams is also a cartoon, just of the opposite kind, a paragon of humanity who can do no wrong, but whom everyone but his rapt students believe is the devil.
How can they write stuff like this? Is this what passes for creativity in Hollywood? I watched this on TCM immediately after the old "Goodbye Mr. Chips", and as angelic as the characters in that were, they at least seemed like real people. This script is as manipulative in its own way as "Death Wish", trying to provoke the same level of rage toward the symbols of a hated culture. It makes sense when the target is the culture of thuggish gangs who rape and murder, but of prep schools? What's so awful about prep schools? I went to one of the top schools, and believe me, it was a heck of a lot more inspiring than public school. This movie is insulting junk.