Absolutely Unconvincing

Rating: 5/10 (1 April 2003)

How can anyone feel moved by DEAD POET`S SOCIETY ? It`s got to be one of the most overrated and sugar coated films ever made . I`ve seen more reality in LORD OF THE RINGS
First up is the rich kids schoolboy characters . Come on surely they are amongst the most unlikable people on Earth . Fortunate , spoiled rotten , dripping with money and who let the world and his wife know it , nothing about the boys here rings true . The strongest thing they put in a pipe is hand rolling tobacco ? Yeah right .
Secondly there`s the teachers . I know I can speak for all of us when I say there were certain teachers at school who made our lives a total misery , you know the ones I`m talking about , they make the gestapo look like social workers and whose only function in life was to show us that injustice and sadistic cruelty do indeed exist in a democratic country . I guess that DEAD POET`S SOCIETY tries to make that point too but it fails . The " bad " teachers here are shown as being stuffy disciplinarians who do everything by the book but there`s no one here that you can describe as being the worst nightmare of your own schooldays
And has this film got anything against Shakespere ? FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING feels it might have been written and acted ( Especially by Ian McKellen and Sean Bean ) in a Shakespere style . DEAD POET`S SOCIETY most certainly isn`t , so why does the film put the boot into the great bard ?
DEAD POET`S SOCIETY isn`t an awful film , but neither is a great one . It`s spoiled by an infusion of sentimentality at the expense of reality . I do concede that Williams is rather good in the role of John Keating , performed at a time when he was known only as a manic comedy actor , but Williams alone isn`t really enough to hold your attention in a film that feels overlong