This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The two leads of this film do an adequate to excellent job all things considered. But that's really about the nicest thing I can say about this movie.The makers of this film either were trying to make a piece of blatant propaganda or were sincerely interested in giving a dynamic presentation of a complex issue but fell flat on their face. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope it was the latter. I will say this, the makers do seem to have an at least slightly more lucid understanding of the issue of school shootings than say, Michael Moore, or a lot of other mainstream Hollywood personalities do. For example, "I shot as many people as I did because I had to reset the precedent" is exactly the kind of thing a school mass shooter would say, maybe not after being arrested but before in his journals and "confession" tapes. They were able to recognize and convey the idea that infamy is at least almost as big a motive for people like Herman as "revenge" and that there is more too it than just "wahaha I was bullied so now I'm gonna show everyone by shooting up my school".The problem is, that little bit of remarkable perceptiveness and insight is completely balanced out by asinine and simplistic messages about other aspects of school shootings. Anyone who has researched the issue even a little in depth knows that the majority of school shooters are not really severely bullied and the ones that clear whole classrooms are especially unlikely to have been severely hazed, in fact they are often bullies themselves. This is not to say that it was "wrong" per se for them to portray Herman as having been a victim of hazing and cyberbullying, the filmmakers are not obligated to make him exactly like other school shooters and should be free to form their own interpretive framework, but they just really hammered it home too hard. Degrassi can be somewhat excused for their overly simplistic interpretation of the relationship between hazing and school shootings because they made that episode at a time when the narrative that the CHS shooters were just two bullied teens driven to the edge by extreme hazing was still the most widely accepted theory, but that notion has long since been debunked, and in 2012-2015 we should know better. I've seen a couple people ask why they chose to cast a pretty boy as the shooter. Well to be honest that was one of their better decisions, because the students who do this kind of thing really are often pretty boys, not acne-ridden overweight outcasts. I mean obviously it's true that a pretty boy can be a bullying victim as much as anyone else, but the narrative that the skinny emo kid that no one talks to is the most likely to attempt an act like this is a disingenuous and frankly dangerous one. Being antisocial does not automatically rank you at the bottom of the food chain.Every other aspect of the film is a jumbled mess. It seems like in an attempt to frame a dynamic "discussion" about school shootings they decided to try and shoe-horn in as many related topics as possible, but as a result they ended up taking the most juvenile and superficial approach to each one. There's that one political show that serves as an obvious and obnoxious allegory for Fox right-wing talk shows, which is really no more subtle than an SNL sketch about the same subject. There's a Michelle Bachman-like Republican legislator (they just couldn't resist including her party affiliation for the record) who I guess is supposed to p#ss us off with how b#tchy and unsympathetic to Herman she is except the film never really gives us any reason for us to fell all that sorry for him either. Then, as if in an attempt to make it more fair to conservatives, they have some liberal d##s##t commentator who is also presented as being just as much of a moron, along with his "killing people won't stop people from killing people" followers. Maybe the message was "hey look, talking heads who get involved in school shooting stories are nothing more than opportunistic bloodsuckers no matter which end of the political spectrum they hail from", but I doubt it.There's also some peripheral expository arch about Herman's sister having been killed by a car a couple years before the shooting, complete with way over-the-top sequences of him being haunted by her. The best I can tell is that since he felt it was his fault, that feeling of already having blood on his hands made him less apprehensive about the massacre, but they never really explain it in so much detail. There's also a side-story about Lax Morales's having rolled with a quasi-neonazi underground group during the days of his youth and possibly having been implicated as an accessory in the manslaughter death of a black teenager. The relevance this has to the rest of the movie is never flushed out; they clearly thought it was contributing to some kind of "hate breeds hate, violence breeds violence" message which I suppose could have worked but didn't.For people familiar with school shooting movies, "Zero Day" is usually the gold-standard. Now I don't think this film should have been "like Zero Day" and for the record I think some of the things they did were pretty clever. But watching Zero Day can help make clear some of the things that this film unquestionably did wrong.

Please do yourself a favor and watch something else.Anything else. This movie. Man, just when I didn't think the film could get any worse it did. I'm not sure who I should blame first. The director or the screenwriter. I think that the director takes the cake ( by that I mean the blame) for this movie. Mostly because of the horrible acting. Did anyone else see the crazy blonde lady that looked like she walked off SNL? How does a director let something like that happen? and the two lead men? Man did they try. Oh they tried to give us something. But Garret looked like a Disney kid who got lost. Another painful to watch performance came from the director herself staring as none other than boys mother. I think that out of the whole film only two people gave worth while performances. One was the female police offer who had two minutes of screen time and the beautiful Latina lead. They truly did a really good job when you look at the film as a whole. If only they hadn't been apart of this. The film lacked all vision. Nowhere at anytime could I see what they hell the filmmakers where trying to do. I wish that a film on this subject would have gone farther. Gave us something to really think about. But instead it gave us corny character names and cringe worth dialogue. The editing on this film was so amateurish I thought that I was watching the work of a film school drop out. The editor clearly was trying to use Lee Smith's tricks ( Lee Smith editor for many of Christopher Nolan's films) for flash backs and quick cuts. Not a single time was it done properly. Thank god Norman had the walking dead to go back to after this train wreck of a film. Over all the film is completely half baked.

I'm terribly disappointed with this film. If you think this is a spoiler then stop reading...It paints a sincerely false belief that video games are the sole reason this kid did violence. "That" is what is shoved down your throat in the foreground of this film, all throughout it. While in the background, pale examples of this kids abusers and a lack of anyone to turn to are the real reasons behind his violent outburst.Stop trying so hard to convince people that violent video games encourage people to be violent when in reality, people being violent to another person while teachers do "nothing" about it, and with no one at all for this kid to talk to about his problems and without being provided with ANY realistic solutions to his problem, is why he became violent.

The premise of this movie could have made for a good story but the infantile development by the director was not only bias...something a real crime of this nature should certainly not need...but made you feel as if you were watching a bad soap opera. The b rate actors, excluding the reporter and the young criminal, bring a new low to movies. It would have been easier to watch an hour of the stupid video game they kept showing. Rob Estes was so bad that I actually hope I never, ever have to endure him on the screen again. If you are going to bash Fox...and I am not saying you shouldn't...make sure you at least appear smarter. Terrible direction and lousy actors shred any hope of the premise rising to any fruitful work.