Lethal Justice

Murder; rape; bullying; a mother's dominance; a father's back-turning; revenge; brown-nosing - just a few of the wonderful topics depicted in this movie. That might be reality, but, some of it is lost in the actors' reactions to these subjects. Or, perhaps they were TOLD how to react by the director. Anyway, LETHAL JUSTICE didn't quite hit the mark with me, although it DID evoke some of my appropriate emotional responses to these misbehaviors. The jist is that a bullying high school student rapes one of his teachers, but, the milktoast principal is intimidated by the boy's domineering mother and is too inactive to satisfy a group of the victim's co-workers. So, they take discipline into their own hands and, as a result, one of them is killed by a friend of the accused. Might appeal to those who get off on negativity and believe that violence begets violent justice.

It could be argued that this film is something of a premonition of the Colombine massacre. A group of teenagers get together to commit a serious crime, but there the similarity ends.

The plot in itself, that a group of teachers get together to form a vilgilante squad to pay back a serious assault on a teacher, is a good one; unfortunately, it is not done very well. The script was poorly written. The reaction of the school principal to one of his staff being raped by a student is frankly unbelievable. Some of the acting among the teachers is bad. Very bad.

At the school I went to, if a student had stood in front of a class with a knife at a girl's throat while his mate raped a teacher in the closet, he would have quickly dropped the knife after the hardnuts had told him what would happen to him if he didn't. But the class just sat at their desks and did nothing. No. I don't think so. Real among adults maybe; but never among teenagers.

Nice try, film makers; but sorry, just not good enough.