This "School" Rocks...

Rating: 9/10 (8 February 2004)

It was just a matter of time until a film like this came along. A slacker decides to transform a bunch of repressed children into well-educated young adults. Wait a minute, what am I saying? Films like this have come along many times before--"The Dead Poets Society," "Mr. Holland's Opus," "Hardball," and "The Emperor's Club," and that's only naming a few titles of many.
But here's a movie so different from the rest it deserves some type of attention. Gone are the clean morals of, say, "Mr. Holland's Opus"--here come lines like, "Stick it to the man!" with a trailer that advertises, "...a man who taught them to break the rules." These rules, by the way, are applied and kept in order by a private elementary school, where Dewey Finn (Jack Black) is posing as a teacher in order to get some cash to put together his own rock band.
"'The Man' is everywhere," he preaches to a small group of children. "You've gotta stick it to him." So they stick it to "The Man" by forming a rock band during school hours and entering into the Battle of the Bands--in hope that they'll win the jackpot reward for first place.
I need to start at the beginning.
Dewey Finn is a slacker loser who plays guitar like a pro--the only problem is that he gets stoned when he and his band are performing and embarrasses his fellow players. After they kick him out prior to preparing for the upcoming Battle of the Bands, Dewey decides to form together his own band by getting some money. But how?
Dewey's roommate Ned Schneebly (Mike White, who also wrote the film and a song in it) is a substitute teacher ("Not a temp!"), and so when the phone rings and the call is for Ned, Dewey decides to pose as his best friend in hopes of getting some quick cash. He soon finds himself at "the best school in the state," teaching a class of strange kids and trying to avoid getting found out by the principal (Joan Cusack). A school dropout himself, Dewey only knows one thing: Music. So he teaches music to the kids after finding out they can play various instruments--piano, guitar, drums, and even the cello (which he decides to leave out of the forming band).
Dewey decides to enter his "School of Rock" into the Battle of the Bands, much to the laughter of other competing bands. But he has true faith in his pack of school kids. That's part of what makes the film so inspirational and different from the other junk adorning the market right now--this seems real, and so does the affection, and Jack Black turns Dewey Finn into a likable character--the opposite of what someone like Adam Sandler might have done with the kids. (I can see him in the role, but the film would undoubtedly have been a bit less of a serious comedy--it would've turned into a loud, noisy, sporadically amusing comedy.)
The movie uses a lot of old cliches, but they all come off as--at the very least--acceptable, given the material. This is a refreshingly refreshing comedy, the type of film that makes you feel good after leaving the theater--which is a very rare thing these days. The final Battle of the Bands is both realistic and uplifting. Even the end credits are fun to sit through.
The film completely relies upon Jack Black as its carrier, and lucky enough for the film he is a very good lead. This is the film lover's version of a Rob Schneider or Chris Farley. Black has been around for a long time, always playing good co-star roles, and in "High Fidelity" he proved that he was more in-tune with the present times than any other recent "SNL" comedian. Not that Adam Sandler is bad given the right material, but how many times do we have to put up with re-makes of "Happy Gilmore"?
Black is arguably one of the funniest fat comedians since John Candy, when given the appropriate material. He's the type of comedian who could become quite annoying very quickly, but with the right material and director focusing behind the camera he turns out to be funnier than most guys out there. Black's ability to pick increasingly good scripts is something John Candy never seemed to be able to master; although I think it was basically because Hollywood didn't want Candy to get good scripts.
Once and a long time there comes the surprise hit wonder. Nobody ever thought that "School of Rock," a movie starring Jack Black as a slob rock guitarist, would ever amount to anything. But it turned out to be one of the most critically-praised films of the year, and after seeing it for myself, I have to agree that this is a well-made film that has certainly been done before, but rarely this good, and even rarer is the formula ever this likable.
4/5 stars.

John Ulmer