Rent Dangerous Minds (1995)

Getting through to youngsters who at first don't want to listen - Dangerous Minds review by PT

Michelle Pfeiffer plays an ex marine who takes on her toughest challenge, teaching rebellious inner city kids English. The kids have so far driven one teacher to a nervous breakdown and the other quit before meeting the same fate. On her first day she turns up all prim and proper, like she's teaching at Eton. Five minutes of abuse and she walks out on the verge of quitting. Of course she digs in and returns next day in jeans and tailors her teaching to get the kids attention. Strangely she uses Bob Dylan's lyrics as the poetry to study, I say strangely as this is based on a true story and Bob just been given the Nobel prize for literature.

She starts earning some respect with her unusual methods, like throwing out candy bars to right answers and rewarding good work with a trip to the fairground.

There are some knock backs along the way but the teacher starts to spark an interest , and the intellect of these so called problem kids start to shine through.

Pfeiffer who is actually acting in a class here, is always a class act, making you like her for her compassion shown to the kids. Equally you get to care for the kids and want to see them reach their potential. Top marks.

Gangsta’s Paradigm - Dangerous Minds review by griggs

By the mid-90s the “teacher saves the kids” formula was running on fumes, and this film doesn’t resuscitate it. Michelle Pfeiffer strides into a classroom of supposedly unreachable students, wins them over with a karate demo, then insists that Dylan lyrics, poetry—and yes, even conjugating verbs—will change lives. Dangerous Minds dresses itself as gritty realism but delivers Hollywood uplift in a leather jacket.

Pfeiffer is magnetic, almost too much so. Her conviction only exposes how thin the script is. The students are sketches rather than people, wheeled in to prove her methods work. The film nods at poverty, race, and neglect, but only in passing, before hurrying back to another breakthrough montage.

It’s slick, watchable, and not without charm, but hardly the reinvention the genre needed. In a line-up of cinematic saviour teachers, this one feels like it borrowed its homework and still scraped by.