Bad Boys

It's obviously an 80s film, I loved the pointless explosion when Penn just drives his car over that kid. A lot of it doesn't make sense yet I enjoyed seeing a young Sean Penn and it's a good movie if you don't analyze it too much. I was hoping this would be straight up mindless fun cause of the plot summary: Mick O'Brien plays by the rules - THE WRONG RULES. I love me some 80's cheese.

By the numbers character study of teen angst set in a juvenile detention facility. The DVD blurb declares Sean Penn as "the greatest actor of his generation", and he really lays it on thick in several scenes here...glowering, jaw clenching, crying, moody nostril flaring, etc. He even swings a pillowcase full of soda cans at a homosexual rapist played by a mincing Clancy Brown sporting a huge blonde mullet. Now that's quality acting.

Decent for a feature on troubled and rebellious youth. Its explanation for the kids' sociopathic and nihilistic behavior is pretty skimpy, but I don't know whether that should count for it or against it considering the really simplistic moralizing found in other films. I do know that this feels pretty exploitative in parts, but it manages to be good, albeit a bit shallow, entertainment.

This one with Sean Penn. Didn't like this movie what so ever.

An old fashioned film set in a contemporary setting, it may pale in comparison to certain other prison films in terms of grittiness, but this slightly more digestible prison film gradually reveals its admirable humanist agenda (in favour of out-right nihilism and nastiness like in certain other prison films). Penn looks incredibly young here and even this early in his career he's portraying the tough-guy-revealing-his-inner-emotions character very finely.

The dialogue can be outright atrocious and laughable but it takes you back to a time when cinema had the audacity to show you what you had previously shielded yourself off from. The scene showing the actual crime is something you don't see in film anymore.

British hoodlum drama Scum remade by Americans. The tone of the plot is serious, in a dull way. I didn't care about any of the characters, and the drama seems overblown, for the realism it aims for.

There is only two Sean Penn movies that I legitimately dig and this is one of them (well, three if you count Team America: World Police). Penn's cellmate is a straight G.

74.125

packs a good punch....especially in the prison showdown scene........recommended.

Well... I figured out long ago that the overwhelming majority of juvenile offenders are sociopathic little creeps who ought to be locked away somewhere so they can only victimize each other. I don't want to see a movie about them. Almost all the characters here are exactly that, including the protagonist. Only Eric Gurry as Horowitz saves this movie from being two hours of GRIM AND UNRELENTING (just like Rosenthal's other movie, _Halloween II_); Horowitz is at least a smart, likable sociopath

Average film that stole quite a bit from the british film Scum.If you want to see a proper film about Juvenile detention see Scum a far superior film.