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Apt Pupil
Sixteen-year-old high school student Todd Bowden (Renfro) has uncovered a deadly secret. Far from suspicion, Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander (McKellen) \nhas been quietly living in Todd's hometown....  View more >

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Please Note: Reader Reviews are submitted by the readers of The BigScreen Cinema Guide and represent their own personal opinions regarding this movie, and do not represent the views of The BigScreen Cinema Guide, or any of its associated entities.

[--- See Now! ---]by  
Jan 25, 2000
PROLOGUE: When I first found out that they made a film out of Stephen King's novella "Apt Pupil", I was immediately excited and looking forward to its release. I read King's short story and found it thoroughly interesting, and I expected the same from the movie, especially considering that it was directed by Bryan Singer, the mastermind behind THE USUAL SUSPECTS. I wasn't disappointed. Like THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, this is a Stephen King movie that surpasses the book on which it is based.

First of all, the direction of Singer is astounding. I was amazed at how intense this movie was, and this can be credited to Singer's methods of creating suspense. The story revolves around a high school kid (Brad Renfro) who seems to have it all: brains, good grades, popularity, girlfriends, and athletic talent. He also is obsessed with the holocaust, and eventually blackmails an escaped Nazi concentration camp leader, played by Ian McKellen, into telling him the horrors of the holocaust. The more he learns, the more obsessed he becomes, as both characters go into a downward spiral of morality and sanity. They go from re-entacting a Nazi soldier march to killing small animals, slowly losing grip on sanity and self control.

The acting in this film is superb. Renfo displays an intensity that other young actors like Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Leonardo DiCaprio wish they had. McKellen is also excellent. Instead of resorting to portraying his Nazi character as a one-dimensional villan, he shows one man's reaffirmation of evil. The only problem is David Schwimmer. C'mon, what the hell is "Ross" doing in a movie like this? When he first appeared, everyone in the audience LAUGHED! Notwithstanding this, a very good movie, sure to capture your attention. SEE IT!

RATING: A (9.5 out of 10)



[--- Good ---]by  
Jan 25, 2000
My recommendation of Apt Pupil comes solely from a twist that I wasn’t expecting that made the previous two hours I had waded through worthwhile. While Ian McKellan’s performance is notable, parts of Apt Pupil drug. I also had a large problem with the setup for the film: Why is Todd Bowden obsessed with this Nazi to the extent that he becomes? The motivation for this teenager’s actions (and the impetus for the film) is never made clear. Bryan Singer’s influence is definitely here, however, and I have a feeling that at the helm of a lesser talent, I would not be giving Apt Pupil an extremely marginal endorsement.

10-point scale rating: 6

[--- See Now! ---]by  
Jan 25, 2000
Some reviewers found Kurt and Todd revolting, nasty, melodramatic portraits of pure evil. For me, all too far from it. They were evil enough, but not purely. It is the ambiguities which make the film so haunting and disturbing, because it forces the viewer to think, "there but for the grace of God go I."

Since escaping from Germany and moving to the U.S., Kurt had been trying to live down his past, passing his declining years in an innocuous obscurity marred only by an alcohol problem. Not as noble as turning oneself in to certain death by execution, to be sure-- but how many of us would have risen to that occasion? Furthermore, apparently a reclusive bachelor, he was profoundly lonely. Then shimmering young Todd Bowden turns up on his doorstep. The only way out of this junior blackmailer's clutches is to tell his life story intimately to him in confidence. But Todd represents something more than an obstacle on the way to peace and quiet. Suddenly the decrepit old man finds an opportunity he was never expecting would come his way again: to be paid attention to, heard, admired, even to be a father or grandfather. When he saw a chance later on to play that role explicitly, in fact, he seized it eagerly.

Todd's motives, too, were mixed. One thinks of the scene in the fascinating PBS TV series "I, Claudius," in which the protagonist visits his very aged grandmother Livia, whom he suspects of breathtaking treacheries throughout her long life. "Wicked woman!" he would later exclaim in his memoirs. But now Livia is dying; and Claudius, a scholar and researcher as avidly curious as Todd, is seized with a desire to hear first-hand the details which would otherwise perish with her. He, too, elicits them by means which, while not descending to blackmail, are hardly irreproachable: a promise which he doubts he can fulfil, and probably does not even believe in principle, to make her a goddess.

If the arrangement Todd makes with Dussander is evil-- well, isn't the country swarming with hundreds of reporters doing little better, and guess who pays them to do it by hanging on their every word?

No one else seems to have caught the meaning of the moment in which Todd abruptly and Kurtly orders his girl friend to blow her cigarette smoke in another direction. I submit that his meticulous studies had uncovered the fact that one of Adolf Hitler's fanatic aversions was to smoking and smokers (a fact which those affecting the same fanaticism today would doubtless prefer were not disseminated). He's just trying the part on for size.

Speaking of this scene, one cannot overlook the suggestions of homoerotic sado-masochistm in the relationship with Kurt. Todd does not perform to his girl friend's satisfaction, and she accuses him ofnot liking women. Maybe he doesn't, particularly, and that might have been a problem for a 16-year-old in those days (I mean, this was way back in 1984). Todd is reclining sensuously on the sofa when he asks with bated breath, after one of Kurt's descriptions of an atrocity, "how did it feel?" Later, Kurt slowly approaches Todd as though to embrace him, only at the last second turning the gesture into a reach for an object behind the boy. At their last meeting he grasps Todd's arm and implores in return, "how did it feel?" Repressed sexuality will have out in many strange ways.

At least one renowned computer game invites thousands of middle-class adolescents to imagine taking command of a Panzer division and crushing defending Polish cavalry (the real kind, on horseback). Is it such a far cry from that to be intrigued by the opportunity, should it come one's way, to command a German army? Yes, perhaps only for a few minutes, and only a single old man-- yet imagine the chance, before one's eyes, to bark real orders to a genuine Nazi soldier in full uniform... Dare we scoffat the idea that many a suburban kid reared on fare now considered quite ordinary would find that heady stuff?

I could go on with more details-- e.g. how impressive and tastefully distinctive Dussander's house looks on the outside, with its sleek Frank-Lloyd-Wright lines and the intricate colored window in the front door through which Todd peers, beguiled by the mysteries within. Inside it's just casual squalor, the more so the closer we look. Nothing shocking, just depressing in its utter non-descriptness. Like how "it feels", maybe. Perhaps the innermost secret is that it doesn't.

This is a film made particularly chilling and horrifying by its understated subtleties. But as far as I can see, those critics, devoid of imagination or empathy, who make blind to them and dismiss it asham-handed or trivial are scarier still.

Jan 28, 2004
When he learned that there\'s a former Nazi living in his home town Brad Renfo, tries to balckmail him in exchanged for some infronation. And that\'s where \"Apt. Pupil\" ended. What that former Nazi (played by Ian Mckellan) will say won\'t shock anyone (well anyone who ever saw \"Schindler\'s List\"). this is the first time a Nazi is being push around by a kid. Silly? NO! Sad? YES!

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