DVD Review: Apt Pupil

This movie really should have been called Inept Pupil. I watched it last weekend, and as the days roll by, my opinion of it keeps sliding lower and lower; out of fairness to the director (Bryan Singer), I should post my review now before my views deteriorate even further.

In our movie, Brad Renfro plays Todd Bowden, a supposedly bright, straight-A high school senior who develops a fascination with Nazi history after his social studies class covers the Holocaust. (He begins spending inordinate amounts of time on extracurricular reading regarding Adolph Hitler et al.) One rainy night, he spots a man on a bus in his California town who looks very similar to a figure he came across in his studies ("contrived" doesn't begin to describe this). After a month of painstaking research, he concludes that the man is indeed Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen), a Nazi fugitive who has been on the lam for decades.

Now, does our apt pupil call the local police or the FBI? Does he just forget about his obssession and go back to getting straight-A's and playing baseball? He does neither; rather, he decides to visit Dussander and blackmail him into giving him all the gory details about the Nazis' prefered methods of torture and death. By getting Dussander to talk, Bowden thinks that he's getting the real deal: all the first-hand accounts that he can't find in stuffy academic books.

This is when we realize that Bowden is not so apt, after all. What does he expect to learn by fulfilling his macabre fascination? Does he think that it will help him to become an adroit historian or political philosopher, theorizing about the nature of evil and totalitarianism?

After several months of listening to Dussander's graphic detail, Bowden, of course, begins to snap (and this is where this "thriller" gets "psychological"). He constantly thinks and dreams about death camp victims, his grades slip, he starts to draw swastikas in his notebook, etc. He is also, of course, over his head, as Dussander connives his own retaliatory blackmail scheme.

I certainly won't spoil the ending, but just believe me when I say that there is nothing shocking about it. If memory serves me correctly, part of the original marketing for the film implied that there would be something icky or psychologically disturbing at the end (that's why my wife didn't want to watch it; call me desensitized, but I found nothing of the sort and felt cheapened and deceived.

Besides the stupidity of the character of Todd Bowden, I was not at all impressed by Brad Renfro's performance. Apparently, Bryan Singer was trying to cast someone who looked fresh, innocent, and full of curiosity (the apt pupil). However, in Renfro's performance, we get someone who is not just fresh, but vacuous, lending no personality to Bowden at all. At the end of the movie, I just got the impression of an inept, souless, narcissistic kid, who loses all of his moral fiber while gaining no panache (if one is going to become evil, he at least should have some flair).

What made this movie tolerable was Ian McKellen's performance as Dussander. The man who gave us Peter Jackson's vision of Gandalf does a fine job of portraying a drunk, washed-up Nazi. However, both Singer and Brandon Boyce (the screenwriter) do not give us any interesting insights into the man. Why did Dussander join the Nazis? Was he merely one of the drones doing the bidding of his superiors, or was he an ideological stalwart? How does he feel now about non-whites? Besides some sloppy attempts at psychological interpretation (e.g., a clumsy scene where Dussander nearly roasts a cat...I think that's supposed to be sadism, right?), Singer and Boyce give us no depth behind Dussander. Given the slipshod script he was given, McKellen did an admirable job.

In short, Apt Pupil is not worth your time or your money. While part of me wants to "ruin" the ending so you won't bother seeing it (though, as mentioned, the ending is not worth keeping secret), I will hold my tongue. Final Score: 5 out of 10 (it would have been less had it not been for McKellen).