This is the "Sister Act II" of Mark Thackeray's life, and what worked in London in the mid 1960's doesn't necessarily strike gold 30 years later. After a forced intro to tie the two films together featuring Judy Geeson and Lulu (repeating the original song with clips of the original scene interpolated over it), Sidney Poitier ends up in Chicago at an inner city school where he's confronted by the most typical archetypes of ghetto life.
The students are cardboard cutouts of real teens whom the audience is forced to find sympathy with even though some of them seem so much older than they're supposed to be. You know from the get go that Poitier is going to end up playing Mr. Fix It, with most of the students out of the blue confiding their darkest secrets to. Of course, Poitier is commanding and extremely likeable, and astute film lovers will appreciate the reference to the 1955 drama "The Blackboard Jungle". But I quickly tired of all those typical tropes of troubled teens that dominate every movie on modern films about education, finding the dialog derivative and the basic plot trite.
The students are cardboard cutouts of real teens whom the audience is forced to find sympathy with even though some of them seem so much older than they're supposed to be. You know from the get go that Poitier is going to end up playing Mr. Fix It, with most of the students out of the blue confiding their darkest secrets to. Of course, Poitier is commanding and extremely likeable, and astute film lovers will appreciate the reference to the 1955 drama "The Blackboard Jungle". But I quickly tired of all those typical tropes of troubled teens that dominate every movie on modern films about education, finding the dialog derivative and the basic plot trite.