187 Review

43 years after Blackboard Jungle, inner-city American schools are still terrifying places - in one of the opening scenes of 187, New York teacher Trevor Garfield - Samuel L. Jackson - is nearly stabbed to death by a student he`s failed. He recovers and relocates to LA and temp work at a school where most of the kids are Latinos and some teachers carry guns. Garfield acts a little strangely; he seems traumatised by his brush with death. He befriends a woman teacher, Kelly Rowan, who is threatened by her students, and he`s given advice by a jaded colleague, John Heard. Meanwhile, the violence spills over into the streets and a couple of his students are killed... This is a rather strange film. It was written by a teacher, Scott Yagemann, and directed by Kevin Reynolds, who`s better known for large-scale films - Waterworld and the Kevin Costner version of Robin Hood, but in its seriously intended attempts to depict the perils of being a teacher, the film goes off into some curiously motivated directions and winds up being not only unsettling, but also pretty bizarre. Jackson is effective as Garfield, but his character seems underdeveloped - we don`t know enough about what drives him, about his personal life. 187 is very well acted and photographed, but dramatically it`s decidedly uneven.