Score: 4
"Eh..."
date: August 8, 2005
Not blam-worthy, but pretty damn overrated. First off, that blond-haired kid had a dopey grin on half the time. Second, while you guys do give credit to "Elephant" for inspiration, and thereby base a lot of your facts on it's interpretation of the events, you seem to forget something: "Elephant" was a Hollywood movie, and therefore was written to entertain; things shown in that movie were not necessarily fact, and neither were many things in your movie.
Now that I'm done with my unbiased review, here's my biased part: You claim to have done extensive research on the subject, and yet you can't understand why these kids would do something like this? What the fuck? Understanding and agreeing with are completely different things. I don't personally agree at all with what those kids did, nor do I seek to justify their actions. But even I can understand why they think they were right in doing what they did.
First off, these kids lived in a close-minded, racist town, something the media conveniently forgot to report, so everyone could act surprised when it was revealed that the kids had pictures of Adolf Hitler on their walls. Second, not only did the kids parents work for a weapons manufacturing company, but they also neglected their children to such a ridiculous extent, they didn't even know that the kids even had said posters on their walls, let alone all the ammunition/explosives-making equipment that was strewn in plain view. The point here is, you're a product of your environment; what these kids did was obviously twisted and wrong, but did anyone step in to help them before this happened? Note that the letters retrieved after the killings blamed not only the students, but family and teachers, too. In other words, life shit on these kids, and not even the grown-ups would put a stop to what was going on. Some reports say that certain adults (teachers included) even perpetrated this shit, allowed it to happen in various forms or another, without paying it any mind.
In other words, the filmmakers should have spent more time discussing how these events lead up to the killings, and what shaped and motivated the killers. They were way sparse on the things that mattered most. This movie, through it's crappy pacing and lack of substance, makes it seem like the kids were just punched around a bit, found each other, then decided to overcome the odds together by shooting everyone. That is not how it happened. The problems ran much deeper than a bruised cheek and bloody nose, and this should have been explained more thoroughly.
The music was probably the redeeming factor here, as it complied nicely with the overall tone.
A slightly-less-than-mediocre flick, overall.