The Chumscrubber seems like another love-or-hate flick. Luckily, I am the one of the fans of this certain style, and I enjoyed every moment of it. If you happen to appreciate this, it is the no doubt that the distinctive way that appeals to you and touches you in a way that does not really work the other type of audience.For me, I think a great job is done by making what originally should be a serious drama about drugs and crimes less serious, noticeably by adding a dark comedic sense to the storyline. Though hilarious at times, the movie still deals with a very serious issue which exceeds the limits of any typical coming-of-age films. In fact, it is more proper to call this a coming-of-age story within a crime story.It is surprising to see this seemingly little movie has such famous cast members. Nevertheless, there is no need to worry and whine about wasted talents. Glenn Close, Ralph Fiennes and Jamie Bell, they all deliver excitingly captivating performances and the overall cast is a great ensemble that easily grasps attention from the viewers.

Dean is a withdrawn teen living in a wealthy suburb where his only friend is Troy, his drug dealer. When Troy dies, a school bully kidnaps Dean's little brother to force him to find Troy's stash.What a terrific movie! I loved it and I think I could see it again and again and still see new things. Although the "rich, alienated teens with self-absorbed parents" plot has been done before, there was nothing cliché about this script. The story constantly surprised me and was quite intense and exciting. The cast is full of big stars: Glenn Close plays Troy's shell-shocked mother, Ralph Fiennes is a spaced-out groom, John Heard plays a tough cop, Allison Janney is Dean's mother obsessed with selling VeggieForce, Jason Isaacs is another parent oblivious to his child and the list goes on. Jamie Bell ("Billy Elliot") is the star, however, and he's quite wonderful as the pill-popping, long-suffering Dean.The movie is a dark comedy/tragedy with a fresh look at the emptiness behind the picture-perfect homes of suburbia. Highly recommended.

This film has many positive points and many negative points. The two ultimately end up canceling each other and at the end of the film I personally ended up with nothing. The cast is simply brilliant and each and every identifiable character is well-developed and performed extremely well by an unbelievably long series of excellent actors. Being a first venture for the writer/director this shows how many people believed in the project and were ready to commit to it. Sadly what now follows is the negative part of my review. The direction, albeit very good, is also laden with numerous clichés, which after a while start being the only noticeable features of the film. While viewing the film I was slowly removed from the story and started to see all the other films it reminded me of, and sadly it was not a short list*. This fact disconnected me from it eventually and I couldn't appreciate it anymore. This fact, coupled with the fact that the writer/director claims he is shining a spotlight on a subject that is muted was irritating actually, because it was blatantly false, because even though the closest to life in American suburbia I ever was, was a month long trip in 1998, I still got the same message from this film as I got from a number of films before it. One other thing that left me a bit perplexed was some characters' behaviour. I don't mean the offbeat or eccentric behaviours of some of the characters. Those were plausible and perfectly at home with the plot of the film. What I mean is the illogical behaviour of some characters, mainly the teenagers, starting from an academically bright "good lad" (even though fleeing from over-protective and ambitious parents), and a girl who at first glance seems to be good natured, passively agreeing to the whims of an antisocial thug to the point of kidnap and threat of murder, with the latter tolerating obvious flirtation with her own mother, while the former, suddenly blows into a desperate murderous rage, and accepts the fact that the person who initially proposed the murder would not have any part in it. The fact that people who seem to dislike each other have repeated conversations on the telephone in the evening, and finally the issue about drugs: I might have missed a crucial metaphor here, but throughout the film one sees drugs of some kind being distributed to virtually everyone in school, and people pop them here and there and get an instant relief, almost as fast as an injection. The main character ingests psychiatric medication almost by the handful on an "as required" basis (akin to using an asthma inhaler) with virtually no effect apart from satisfying his father, and finally when an incredible amount of a variety of drugs is put in a casserole by a child relatively silent and yet intent on sabotage to the rest of his family beyond belief. This results in a number of supposedly drug-naive individuals at a wake, ingesting an amount of crushed pills meant to supply a whole high-school at once, and only end up laughing and being promiscuous with no further consequence. I found that to be disturbing. Well to end this rather long comment, I think this writer director has potential and certainly commands respect from people who count. I hope this film (somewhat undeservedly) gets him enough success to enable him to make further movies which he himself can relate more to, in order to have more heart and truly be an original work free from the weight of previous films dictating its impact.* I'd recommend to watch the missing child sequence from "The Phantom of Liberty" by Luis Bunuel for example.

I can hardly begin to describe how much I love this movie. If it were a man, I would marry him and bear 20 of his children. The story was good, the acting was excellent, the casting was flawless, the overall atmosphere was perfection, the intended audience reactions were felt (whether you wanted to feel them or not), and there were enough subtleties to make you feel better about yourself as a relative-to-body-size-large-brained-primate for catching them.Every actor in The Chumscrubber will go on from this movie and become new people and new faces all over again, never to be remembered strictly as "that guy in The Chumscrubber". This is not to say that their characters were not memorable or dynamic; it is quite the opposite, for their characters were incredibly and intensely dramatic composites. It is more that they themselves, as actors and actresses, define the roles they play rather than the roles defining their careers. Truly, Mark Hamill, for example, will always be remembered as Luke Skywalker (in fact, I'm sure many people don't know him as anything but "Luke"), but there are very few who would define Harrison Ford as simply Han Solo.Unlike many recent movies, with several different climaxes (taking away from the implied orgasmic excitement of a grand finale), the story builds from a disturbingly calm beginning to the tension of a Parkinson's patient constructing a card house. The so-called-sane's irrationality outlining the few truly sane individuals' frustration in the movie is enough to make the viewer want to punch someone in the face just to release the tension. With orchestral magnificence, all the players contribute to the winding array of viewpoints with their own unique (but commonly mad) personalities binding their fates.All the right ingredients were in place to create the ultimate cake of disaster: the absurdity of trivial obsessions; self-absorbed hypocrites; the influence of "the mob"; uncontrollable, chip-on-their-shoulder teens; and, of course, drugs in suburbs. Ironically, each of the above mentioned function perfectly together without interruption or question...until one drop of sanity is thrown into the mix.