Dangerous Minds: Critic Reviews

If only the filmmakers had used some subtlety in telling the story, they could have done right by the real LouAnne Johnson.

Pfieffer is absurdly miscast: Sly Stallone would make a more plausible Mr. Chips than the frail, squeaky actress does a nine-year veteran of the Marine Corps.

The movie pretends to show poor black kids being bribed into literacy by Dylan and candy bars, but actually it is the crossover white audience that is being bribed with mind-candy in the form of safe words by the two Dylans.

The movie has real emotional and reportorial credibility, a prime source of its power.

Pfeiffer has a lot of good moments as Johnson.

Stay home and watch Welcome Back Kotter. It's more enlightening.

Pfeiffer gives a funny, scrappy performance that makes you feel a committed teacher's fire to make a difference.

The tale screenwriter Ronald Bass came up with, and the way director John N. Smith tells it, is stereotypical, predictable and simplified to the point of meaninglessness.

None of it rings the slightest bit true; all of it insults the intelligence.

So whitebread I want to call everyone involved 'Urkle'.

Horrible. A waste. How was this ever a hit?