Light it Up

In his dazzling leading-role debut, Usher Raymond (Billboard's "Star Of The Year") plays Lester, the troubled teen who has finally been pushed to his limit. Taking matters into their own hands, Lester and his friends hold a police officer (Forest Whitaker) hostage and barricade themselves inside the school. Negotiator Audrey McDonald (Vanessa L. Williams) struggles to maintain peace while tensions simmer inside. As the crisis builds, "The Lincoln Six" discover talents they didn't know they had as their fight to expose dismal classroom conditions gains national attention. Starring "a cast of gifted newcomers" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times), this powerful and uplifting film lit up audiences around the nation.

It makes sorrowful sense that a 1999 revision (albeit unofficial) of John Hughes's The Breakfast Club would involve guns on a high school campus, a children's crusade fought on the Internet, a handful of adolescents imprisoned by their fight-or-flight reputations in the inner city, and... oh yes, Judd Nelson. Nelson, who played the heavy-metal lout from a violent home in The Breakfast Club, shows up here as a hip history instructor named Knowles, so committed to his students in deplorable classroom circumstances that he leads them to friendlier digs off-campus and is suspended for his efforts.

Already outraged about an earlier run-in with a high-strung security guard (Forest Whitaker)--who later pulls a gun on the most harmless kid at school--young Lester (Usher Raymond) wounds the guard, leads a takeover of the building, and oversees authorship of an online manifesto explaining his actions. While supporters, detractors, and cops jockey for position outside, Lester and his fellow rebels, a perfect mix of teenage archetypes who normally would have little to do with one another, unburden their souls. The Hughes Effect kicks in as Lester reveals that his decent father was killed by racist cops, that a Sal Mineo-type (Robert Richards) is beaten at home, that a pregnant girl (Sara Gilbert) wasn't even kissed by the creep she slept with, etc. Writer-director Craig Bolotin, unlike Hughes, can't persuade us to overlook the convenient symmetries and complementary struggles among his outcasts. Everything begins to feel forced after awhile, heading toward a prefabricated finish, though Bolotin's good intentions are not without some emotional impact. --Tom Keogh