Highly Overrated But Still Good

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Mr. Ronald Gibb (Tim Daly) is a depressed slovenly widowed high school history teacher. His students are bored. His neighbor Holly (Paula Devicq) is interested in him. He has a crush on popular cheerleader Ally Palmer (Hayden Panettiere). She's in a TV ad for her father (William Sadler)'s used car lot. Smart alec Amber (Sarah Steele) teases him about it. Ally breaks up with her boyfriend Brett and Gibb drives her home. Janitor Gabe (Dan Hedaya) notices them together. She gives him a kiss. Then she's kidnapped from her home. Amber publishes a picture of the kiss and Gibb is suspended from school.The production is a bit weak. Director David Ostry doesn't have a compelling style. The movie tries to be quirky but mostly fails. It's also not dark enough. I follow this for the kidnapping mystery but not much else.

After popular high school student Ally Palmer (an appealing performance by the insanely foxy Hayden Panettiere) goes missing, nerdy history teacher Ronald Gibb (an excellent and engaging performance by Tim Daly) becomes the prime suspect concerning her disappearance because he was the last person seen with her. Director David Osky and writer Adam Targum ably wring plenty of painfully funny humor out of Gibb's pathetically lackluster lot in life. Moreover, Osky and Targum not only handle the potentially offensive premise of an older man lusting after a younger girl in a tasteful, yet still hilarious manner, but also derive a considerable amount of sly satiric mileage out of the hypocrisy of certain people in the town and the shameless opportunistic manner in which they attempt to capitalize on Ally's misfortune. The low-key quirky tone and brisk pace keep this picture on a steady course from start to finish. Daly does a fine job of making his sadsack loser character sympathetic; he receives ace support from William Sadler as Ally's slick car salesman father Phil, Paula Devicq as smitten neighbor Holly, Sarah Steele as the brash and meddlesome Amber, John Gallegher Jr. as Ally's dumb boyfriend Brett Mullen, Brian Anthony Wilson as the hard-nosed Detective Dick Moon, and Dan Hedaya as amiable janitor Gabe. Jordan Lynn's glossy cinematography provides an attractive bright look. Randy Lee's jaunty score hits the sprightly spot. A neat little sleeper.

This black comedy, kind of in the spirit of "Election", was only released on DVD several years after it was made and under the misleading title "The Good Student". It's a rare movie that instead of having a traditional hero, has more of a flawed "anti-hero", an unpopular high-school teacher (Tim Daly), who is as absorbed in his rather boring subject (US history) as any high-school teacher, but also harbors a not-so-hidden crush on one of his female students (Hayden Pantierre--I suppose it's kind of hard to blame him there though). After he gives her an ill-advised ride home and ends up kissing her, she mysteriously disappears, and he finds himself the prime suspect.The movie stacks the deck here quite a bit by casting the good-looking and fairly young Daly in the role and also giving him a very attractive love interest more his own age (Paula Devocq). It would have been a lot more brave to cast a guy who LOOKS like a lecherous middle-age creep. He's also seems relatively noble compared to all the other characters in the movie--like the missing girls' father (William Sandler), a car salesman who seems to be using his daughter's disappearance to bolster his business, a cop (Dan Hedaya), who is both overzealous and incompetent, and another female student (Sarah Steele), who mocks "Mr. Gibbs" for his attraction to the missing girl and his interest in "barely-legal" porn, but who turns out to have her own "Lolita" thing going on. The worst perhaps though is a sleazy fellow teacher who confides that he is exchanging grades for sex with his female students.This movie perpetuates the rather tiresome Hollywood myth that very many high-school teachers are, or would even want to, mess around with their students. Of course, not too many high-school students look like Pantierre, or even Steele. (Interestingly, Hayden Pantierre WAS high-school age when she made this movie, but she definitely doesn't look it. Steele, on the other hand, had played one of the more believable teen characters a few years earlier in "Spanglish" when she was in her "awkward years", but those years were obviously well behind her by this time). Like "Election", this movie does have some effective black comedy and satire, but it is a much more hit-and-miss affair. The movie also has a really great ending, but perhaps it is a little too subtle or ambiguous for many people to appreciate. All in all, this isn't a bad movie though.

let's get the good stuff out of the way first...the story line and the writing both are amazing... in the hands of a more capable director, this movie could've been an excellent movie.the story has all the elements that could attract a viewer, from the good building of the problem, the attraction, the deliberate misguiding to the twists at the end. (but no comedy whatsoever)..but it was really really really bad directed, and you can notice that from the very first shot of the film. a summer trained director trying his luck, and thinking that having a star like Hayden Panettiere can sell the movie - which i don't know why she agreed to do the movie in the first place?? being that she's totally in her prime...there are some characters in the movie that were in it only for the purpose of the felling of an empty 5 minutes or something, there are characters that appeared in the beginning of the movie, and it was set in my mind that this character will play an important rule in the story line, but suddenly i didn't see that character again!!!!overall, it was below medium, and really what a sham, it could've been something really good.my vote is 3 out of 10