The Secret Pact

Really enjoyed this one. Good acting all around, smoothly directed, with enough real human drama to make you care about the characters. The two friends are believable, and the rest of the cast is good as well. The plot is simple enough, and the actors do a good job of convincing us of the emotions involved. Quietly tense, dramatic without being overdone, and unique in plot compared to so many thrillers these days. If you're a fan of the genre, which I am, you should enjoy this one. Also, language isn't an issue, nor annoying music. Just good storytelling and pleasing settings. Much better that the 5-ish rating it has right now.

The bad guys send a kid to a prestigious boys' school to find the student who is in the witness protection program, for the usual reasons. Of course, this kid doesn't fit in,socially or otherwise. He tries to befriend the studens in an effort to eliminate, by "friendly" questioning, the possible students on his list. Don''t want to spoil plot by saying more. The student "infiltrator", taught never to trust anyone, is presented as multi-dimensional, and is affected by the other students. Good suspense, excellent characters,and gives insight into how one's upbringing affects who you are.

First off, this movie is not a comedy. It's very serious. Keeping that in mind, read on.

Lenny is a sweet-natured orphan raised on the streets, but he's also a teenage hitman-in-training who is sent to find the only witness to a mob hit. The witness, Greg, also a teenager, is now under FBI protection and attending a prep boarding school in Montreal.

Apparently Lenny's wise guy foster dad, who gave him the assignment, managed to find out where Greg was but couldn't supply a photo (the Mafia isn't as sharp as it used to be), so it's up to Lenny to enroll in the school, go to classes, participate in school activities, and figure out which kid is Greg.

Right. This could happen. In real life. Yes, indeed.

Then there's Lenny's dyslexia, which makes him feel bad about himself. (Training to be a hitman evidently doesn't harm his self-esteem, however.) My favorite part of the movie is when the school counsellor, having noticed that Lenny can't read, gives him a pamphlet on dyslexia for him to -- yes! READ!!

I really wanted to like this story and was willing to suspend disbelief but this film just had too many continuity/believability problems to allow that for long.

The two leads are both attractive young men and it was fun watching their friendship form. It was also fun watching the inter-relationships between the other boys but I kept getting distracted by just how unlikely the plot devices were. Also, the next time a head master of a distinguished private school is giving a speech and the best literary reference that he can make in his speech is a lame reference to Great Expectations perhaps the head master's speech should be written out.

Before watching this I'd recommend School Ties (1992) or Dead Poets Society (1989) or The Emperor's Club (2002) or even A Separate Peace (2004) (TV) All have much more convincing plot lines than this.

In two separate spots the "villain" is about to be lurking just around the corner when something saves him. The villain is looking for one kid on a list of about 8 and the kid we KNOW he's looking for keeps making obvious mistakes that would clue in anyone who was really looking in a heartbeat. e.g. claiming to be from Tampa and not knowing whether its on the Atlantic or the Gulf. It also bothered me how dyslexia was tossed about as a plot point without any real understanding or compassion.

The actors did great with what they had to work with but this could have really used at least one more script revision before it got shot.

The plot hinges upon a college freshman who witnesses his parents being murdered, but since he is wearing swimming goggles at the time, the killers do not get a good look at him, but they know who he is because they were business associates of the parents.

He enters the Witness Protection Program and is concealing his identity by registering with a fake identity at a university in Montreal. His pursuers, one of whom is a classmate, know what college he is attending because they have somehow penetrated the FBI Witness Protection Program, but do not know his fake name or have a picture of his face to put with either the real name or the fake one, so the classmate uses process of elimination to find the son.

But knowing his real name, why not just look through his high school yearbook, where he is on the swim team, to find his picture? Or do a DMV check, which should be no problem for crooks sophisticated enough to penetrate the FBI? And why would he be in Witness Protection before the trial - wouldn't he have to blow his cover to testify? And Polaroid cameras, and student records kept in manila folders in file cabinets instead of computers, in the year 2001?

It would be far more interesting than the film itself was to hear the writers explain how they thought anyone with an IQ higher than 10 could possibly overlook such gigantic holes in the plot. My hunch is that the writers themselves were possessed of no higher acumen than their target audience and were thus incapable of recognizing said holes.