Light It Up Review

On a wintry day in a pitifully under-resourced high school in the Queens district of New York, a popular teacher, Judd Nelson, unable to continue working in a freezing classroom, takes his pupils to a nearby diner which is promptly held up by an armed gunman - and former student. As a result, the headmaster dismisses the teacher, and some of the students rebel. When an over-zealous cop, Forest Whitaker, working as security guard, is shot in the leg with his own gun, a hostage situation develops... Light It Up starts promisingly with a quite devastating depiction of the disastrous conditions at the school, but once the seige is in progress the narrative doesn`t develop very interestingly. There are good performances all around - Forest Whitaker as the hot-headed cop, Usher Raymond as the youth whose unarmed father was killed by white cops, Rosario Dawson as a very bright member of the group, Sara Gilbert as a girl who`s just discovered she`s pregnant, Robert Richard as an abused kid, hip-hop performer Fredro Starr as the most aggressive member of the bunch, Clifton Collins Jr as one of the most sympathetic. The film is well photographed in chilly, wintry colours, and reasonably gripping - but it doesn`t live up to initial expectations.Margaret`s Comments:This is more reminiscent of John Hughes` The Breakfast Club than it is of a hard-hitting social document of the new milennium. What apparently is aimed at is the parlous state of the education system in needy neighbourhoods - in this case Queens in NY - and the extreme situation in which a group of students accidentally find themselves because of the resistance of the system to even acknowledge any need for change. The connection to The Breakfast Club is reinforced by Judd Nelson`s presence in the early scenes. But Light It Up opts for more cliched territory, delving into each of the protagonists` personal traumas - Lester dealing with his innocent father`s death at the hands of the police, Ziggy`s violent father, Lynn`s pregnancy, even the cop`s guilt about his own child. However, the performances work valiantly against the cliches, particularly Usher Raymond as Lester. However, Vanessa Williams` presence, while obviously thought to be a good idea by the filmmakers, yields not a lot. They get her in there and then don`t know what to do with her and so she just fades away. Not a bad film, just a film that falls short of tackling something meaningful.