This was an uneven effort, and the review is two weeks late now. Boy, that personal life protesting for Zombie Rights gets crazy.

More below the cut.

Ok, so, Apt Pupil. It stars Brad Renfro, who was really popular as a kid actor in the 90s, briefly, and Ian McKellen, who is awesome in almost anything. It was directed by Brian Singer, who… ok, let’s be honest. Singer sucks. But at least he is smart enough to cast McKellen in things, as he later put him in the X-Men movies as Magneto.

(Aside: that was simultaneously great and stupid casting. Great, in that he cast two Royal Shakespeare Company alums as major roles, stupid, in that he got them backward. McKellen would have been better as Xavier, and Stewart as Magneto. Think about that; you know I’m right).

The movie resembles his later works in some respects. Questionable pacing, flashy camera trickery. Distracting use of color. You get the idea.

At least it doesn’t feel cheap, like X-Men 2, where you started to wonder if they’d run out of money halfway through.

Apt Pupil is based on the King novella, obviously, and concerns a young (in the movie, not so young) boy (played by Renfro) who becomes obsessed with the Holocaust after realizing his neighbor is, in fact, a fugitive Nazi death camp administrator. He eventually collects enough evidence to blackmail his neighbor (McKellen) in order to learn his secrets; the kid’s morbid fascination has gotten the better of him, and he wants to hear all about the stuff they won’t tell him in school.

At first, his neighbor is very reluctant to indulge this request. He seems to have genuinely put that life behind him, and is now an old man, friendly but introverted, locked up in his house and not bothering anyone. However, the threat of being turned over to the Israelis for trial and certain execution loosens his tongue, and he begins to teach his young blackmailer about the whole sordid, gruesome mess he had overseen.

There’s a fascinating premise here that is largely overlooked in the film version. Can a person who commits great evil reform, without repenting? Can you simply walk away from a past like that, and go back to being a mild-mannered, civic-minded taxpayer with a neat lawn and tidy house, watching Mr. Magoo cartoons? Or is the evil always there, just below the surface, bottled up and looking for a way out?

In either case, the blackmail and story time gives it an opening, and the elderly German gradually redevelops a taste for violence and cruelty, as his student starts to run into the limits of his own tolerance for human depravity, even by proxy.

Some of the genuine tension in watching a story like this is marveling at a protagonists’ stupidity. Here you have a stupid, fixated kid poking a mass murderer with a stick to see how he’d react and get some spooky bedtime stories. It’s infuriating, but.. he is supposed to be a stupid kid. Still, at times you want to yell at the screen seeing it, like when a character runs from the knife wielding killer UP THE STAIRS in a horror movie.

Instead of, you know, out the front door.

Irritating a mass murderer is like that. The ‘mass’ part there should alert you as to the risk to one’s personal safety.

Well, eventually things get more complicated, and the kid gets blackmailed in turn, and the whole situation goes to hell, as one might expect. (Gee, who’d have thought tangling with the SS could go so badly?). There’s a fairly major change from the original ending, and David Schwimmer makes an appearance playing the same uptight douchey guy he always plays. Hi David!

Overall… feh. It’s ok. There are a few genuinely disturbing scenes, and McKellen is great. But he always is. (See his Richard the III sometime, it’s amazing).

There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Next Week: The Green Mile
Last Week: The Night Flier