Highly Overrated But Still Good

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

The soundtrack is better than the film, and the film knows it. I counted, they played Coolio's Gangster four times during the film. Anyway, there is a shopping list full of things wrong with this movie. It is so thrown together and disorganized that you would almost believe it was slapped together in two weeks just so they could use the song while it was still relevant. But whatever, the film is entertaining because of how cheesy it is. Even what's her name's southern accent keeps coming and going. The director just didn't give a sh!t. Oh, and the product placement was just too much. I saw three different students wearing a black shirt with a Dickies logo very visible during the various parts of the film until the very end, when they changed it up to a white shirt with a Dickies' logo. Whatever, at least the film had more than a few unintentional laughs.

An inexperienced teacher, Louanne Johnson (Michelle Pfieffer) is assigned to a class of kids who come from rough backgrounds. They seem hopelessly unmanageable and the school management isn't of much help either. But by the end of the movie, the teacher earns the respect of her students through unconventional teaching methods and by showing genuine concern for them. Of course there are few disappointments but it is a happy ending on the whole.The entire movie is a cliché done to death by Hollywood. We have seen this story in "To Sir, With Love", "Freedom Writers" and countless other movies. I understand that these are biographies of people whose tales are worth telling. But, none of these films are any different from the others. If you've seen one, you've seen them all. Michelle Pfieffer is good as the inspirational pedagogue, but she does not bring anything new to the table. The students are a bunch of clichés we come to expect in these movies; there is the big bully, the bullied, the bright one, the joker and girls in bright-red lipstick, all in need of guidance. Not a bad movie as such, but there is nothing new in it. Watch it if you haven't seen any movie using this formula. Give it a skip otherwise.

There are three types of movies that I am really growing weary of and they are (in descending order): The Cop Buddy Movie, The Slasher Movie (complete with iconic killer) and last but least The Inspirational Teacher Movie.This last genre irritates me most because at least the other two genres are made under the impression that it is nothing but entertainment. The Inspirational Teacher Movie appalls me because by it's very definition it has a noble agenda while at the same time telling and retelling the same story from countless other movies while disguising it's intentions with the message that it is 'based on a true story'. It's even worse when it contains a hard working performance by a good actress.'Dangerous Minds' comes with the 'true story' tag but looks, to me, like pure fantasy. Michelle Pfieffer plays LouAnne Johnson an ex-marine who gets a teaching job at The School From Hell, one of those inner-city prison schools where every student is a drug dealing malcontent. I mean no offense while making that statement but to my mind this is the kind of school that you really only find in the movies The standard first-day-of-class scene has her walking into a room full of troubled African-American and Hispanic students who huff at the idea of having a white woman teaching their class. But a one day and a few playful Karate kicks later she has curried their favor.She uses whatever methods are possible to get these kids to learn even going so far as to offer then meal prizes and candy bars to get them to read. Soon she is trying to get them to find a connection between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. I never made the connection but the kids did and never really let the audience in on what it was that they had learned.The kids are the usual sort for this type of movie: troubled, gang-related and totally out of step with everything until they begin to learn about Bob Dylan *shrug*. The kids are so standard for The Inspirational Teacher Movie that I sort of started to count down to when one of the girls would end up pregnant.Is there anything to salvage from 'Dangerous Minds'? Yes. Pfieffer who is a wonderful actress in the right roles gives the movie more then it deserves but is forced to settle on dialogue that is of no help. I kept wishing that the kicks that she delivers to get the student's attention would have been in her dialogue.

I've enjoyed dramas about teachers who help their students make a difference, such as 'Lean on Me', 'Freedom Writers', and 'One Eight Seven', but this is hardly one of them. The teacher doesn't come close to being remotely strict, and the students don't seem particularly indifferent. The movie isn't so much about ethics as it is about getting inside the heads of these people. There's nothing at stake here. The amusement park and restaurant scenes aren't earned, and aren't necessary. Movies like this don't have to be conventional, but they should mean something. The parts of the film that do work, are when Pfeiffer's character is interacting with the other adults. The relationship between her and the students didn't work for me.**1/2 out of ****