School's out...

Rating: 1/10 (15 October 2005)

Jack Black plays a rock musician who's been fired from his band, and needs money to pay the rent for the apartment he shares with an old buddy and the latter's girlfriend. After a slight case of mistaken identity, he end up temping as a teacher for a bunch of fifth graders at some posh school. needless to say, he then goes on to teach the kids to play rock and "stick it to the Man"...
First off, I really hated this film. The School of Rock may not be a lousy film as far as the technical aspects are concerned, it's just that the script and Jack Black are so incredibly awful that it hurts. The script brings nothing new to the screen, it's just the same old clichés you've already seen too many times before. You can predict exactly what's going to happen at any given moment. The characters are are bunch of one dimensional stereotypes without any connection with the real world. Sometimes a script like this will make you shrug your shoulders with indifference, but School of Rock seems so content with being unoriginal that it makes me sad.
Then there's Jack Black - playing... Jack Black, I guess. It's becoming painfully obvious that his talents are limited to screaming and jumping around. Here, he manages to surpass all his previous efforts by doing this ALL the time. I think Black is nearly every frame of this film, and he's constantly staring, glaring, shouting, twitching, and doing all other sorts of funny (read: nauseating) stuff. The character he plays is supposed to be a lovable rouge, who teaches the kids about real life, but all I could see was an obnoxious, egocentric, mooching bastard that cared about nothing except himself.
There is something wrong when the theme of a film is that you should fight against conformity by adopting another set of conformity - not to mention a film where our hero tells the kids who can't sing or play an instrument, that they can be groupies... way to go, Teach. [1/10]