Stereotypical melodrama. The best thing to come out of this film was a "Weird Al" song.

Assumed this was a comedy when I saw Pfeiffer cast as an ex-Marine, but then..ugh. Is this what passes 4 inspirational these days? At what point does encouragement& incentive cross over into bribery & ephemeral reward? The answer is here. How low can the bar be set 4 students? The answer is here. Anyone who "feels good" watching students attain the smallest of achievements while still lagging profoundly behind is into as much short-term thinking as the true-2-life "tough, but tender" hoods here.

The book is amazing. Read it instead.

awesome soundtrack even though i dont like hiphop and gangsta rap shit

Good

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Painfully idiotic film with awful messages and themes. It revels in the most cliched, fake melodrama, all in an attempt at garnering base sympathy from the audience. As OkkCoCa so brilliantly put it, it wallows in liberal self-loathing, laying most of the blame for inner-city crime on Evil Whitey, and being too chicken-shit to condemn a black culture that glorifies criminals and ignores education. This film is the poor crackhead man's version of "Stand and Deliver".

As bad as Pfeiffer is beautiful.

Let's see if we can squeeze one more movie out of this overused plot...

Condescending as all hell. White woman solves inner-city school problems by treating her kids with kindness and using unconventional teaching methods. Points for a half-decent soundtrack, some good performances from some young actors (albeit with heavily stereotyped roles) and actually creating some decent consequences for the third act (well I say that because it's not entirely toothless - it is, however, still pretty condescending). At least it's not overtly racist!

The great, white savior is here to solve all of your problems! An embarrassingly liberal treatment of race relations meant to allay white guilt more than anything. For all its obvious flaws, check out the movie Half Nelson if you want to see this sort of film done right.