The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

Director: Peter Care
Year Released: 2002
Rating: 1.0

What I had predicted would be a cute and innocuous story of mischievous Catholic kids turns ugly in a hurry, and in-between the Saturday morning cartoon segments, it's pot smoking and getting drunk and incest and wounded psyches and thievery and Animal Planet Gone Wrong … and these adolescents can't possibly be any older than 14 (personal anecdote: the worst thing we ever did was take a picture of some girl's bare ass – what wild and crazy guys our group turned out to be). Comic books and art as a symbol of subconscious want dead-on, Catholicism promoting repression also true, but the constant abuse of a handicapped, close-minded nun (Jodie Foster) is unfair, and the less said about the ridiculous final half-hour – and the Jena Malone 'sub-plot' - the better.