Contest

Good family movie about bullying in high school. The cast of young folk all were great! It plays like an after school special, which in my mind is a good thing. I still remember the ones I was shown as a kid in the 70's and 80's. One thing that stood out to me was the lack of a mean girl focus. These kinds of story lines seem to leave the boy friendships in the background and focus on the girls.

Most impressed with the soundtrack. Katherine McNamara, Kenton Duty, And Daniel Flaherty all have amazing songs! Daniel sounds like a young Bob Dylan and Katherine's voice is beautiful and I understand she co-wrote the song.

You'll find a number of familiar faces from the small screen in the film Contest which was made as part of an anti-bullying initiative. It's a decent effort, but sad to say the main reason, the main taunt that bullies use was never in the film. That is that pejorative beginning with the letter "F" referring to sexual orientation. That in itself makes this an inferior product.

In this film young Danny Flaherty is the target of the jocks in his high school specifically the swim team who love to toss him in the pool as he can't swim. The leader of the bullying and the swim team is Kenton Duty.

However one day Duty is caught in the act and is given a choice, expulsion and curtailment of his athletic activities or befriend Flaherty and head an anti-bullying initiative. Duty calls and Duty chooses.

But Kenton is raised by older brother Kyle Dean Massey who has his own reasons for wanting this to fail. Flaherty's grandmother who raises him owns a pizzeria that someone wants her out of. It's where Flaherty has learned to cook and he's entered a cooking contest where the winner receives $50,000.00 and TV show entitled TV chef. Flaherty has a team of four for the contest and Duty is part of his team.

It goes without saying that when the two are thrown together even though Kenton is initially thinking of sabotaging Flaherty's efforts, eventually he and Flaherty bond in a unique way.

What can you say about a film that totally ignores the chief reason for bullying in school, real or perceived gayness. Maybe had Flaherty been made a gay character this film might have had some bite to it. But I suspect the producers didn't want to hear from religious right.

Contest, a sincere but very weak film.

Message movies can be a bore but not contest. A good cast and a refreshing twist on encouraging positive behavior with a very timely cooking contest at the core Contest is like a sports movie with food! As in most sports movies you may well guess the ending, but you may be surprised, and the journey is with it.

Young actors and a fresh group go filmmakers make this a new entry that will hopefully reach the target audience. This is a good film for families to see together. But as teenagers and young adults may balk at that prospect parents can be comfortable with this as a date night special for their teenagers. The cast is attractive and the romance angle is well played. Contest delivers a message without being preachy and that is very welcome.

This film devotes itself to a series of increasingly unbelievable escalations that are more about out-of-school criminal behavior than about school-bully problems. The theme is endearing, but the delivery is way, way off-topic. Worse, a fair amount of this movie seems almost comedic, which makes it hard to be sure sometimes just whom to feel sorry for.

The script was hard to follow and the direction literally seemed to leave out moments that one had to infer or guess at. Our twelve-year-old son kept asking questions that started with, "Wait! Why did he just say...?" An amazing number of characters are played by actors who look rather a lot like each other, too, so it wasn't always even clear who was whom.

Overall, this wasn't really a story about bullying. It seemed more like an episode of one of those cookie-cutter Disney Channel shows that all seem to star the same adolescent kids, with an unconvincing set of problems dealt with by absurd solutions, all coming together in a silly ending.

If you're looking for a way to connect with your child about this topic, I really would stay away from this one. It unintentionally makes light of a serious issue, and confuses the phenomenon of bullying with complex (and over-the-top) criminal conspiracies. If you even suggest to your child that bullying is similar in school to what it is in this movie, expect to hear the words, "You just don't get it."

I believe this was shown on Cartoon Network in the USA and its aimed at the tweenage audience that the Disney channels do well aiming at.

Tommy seems to be a perennial bullying victim at High School but his tormentor Matt under the threat of suspension befriends him and joins him to enter a cooking contest where Tommy could earn enough money to save his grandmother's pizza shop.

Matt's brother Kyle is cooking a deal where the pizza shop is part of a redevelopment plan and gets his brother, Matt to sabotage the competition. However it seems Matt and Tommy might have bonded but Tommy's friend Sarah is suspicious.

The is a lot of double dealing going on in the plot and some of the characters are flawed so its not all black and white but my word this film is giving mixed messages.

The High School needs to be closed down given how much bullying goes on there, it needed to build its own hospital wing to treat its victims.

At the end of the film one of the characters who has cynically sabotaged, hurt people, manipulated people seemed to have faced no consequences of his actions. A strange outcome for film with an anti bullying message.

Some of the acting is fine, some of its broad. Its a low budget film but the script lacks polish and it would had been more focused if he Disney channel had made it.