American History X

Despite having a somewhat weak cast, this is an incredibly poignant drama of one man's struggle to live a new life. Probably too violent and close-to-home for some.

There's really no point to the movie. Just a lot of violence. That's pretty much it.

You could use this as a skinhead recruitment film because it failed so miserably in the message it was trying to push, and it failed miserably because they were too concerned about pushing the message that they forgot how they were framing the film. So a bunch of skinheads win a turf war basketball game, to stop the gang violence around the basketball courts, and then one of the Black people on the losing side tries to steal the car of one of the skinheads. And then the skinhead goes to jail for killing him. Then we have a flashback where the skinhead argues that Affirmative Action policies that put race before merit are racist because they put race before merit... to presumably illistrate how evil he is. Then his brother reads "Mein Kampf" for a book report and has to write a history paper titled American History X to teach him not to read books that should be banned... like the ACTUAL Nazis banned books. I mean that's not very free speech of them to tell people what they can or can't read. And before he turns it in, he gets killed by a Black kid, involved in the gangs, who took a gun into school. Too often in the film you get those moments where you have to stop and thin