Directed by: Tony Kaye
Starring: Edward Norton, Edward Furlong, Ethan Suplee, Elliott Gould, Beverly D'Angelo, Fairuza Balk, Avery Brooks, Jennifer Lien
Derek Vineyard (Norton) was a good student with everything going for him until his father, a firefighter, was shot and killed by a black man. Derek was forced to drop out of school to help support his family. He soon started following a white supremacy group in which he later became a leader of.
After being sent to jail for 3 years for a race related murder, Derek is released with a whole new view on life. Upon his release, he comes to find out that his little brother Danny (Furlong) is heading down the same path that he was. He is now hanging out with the same hate group and commits the same crimes.
Derek sits Danny down and explains the horrors of prison. Danny understands where his brother is coming from and vows to stop his doings, and he and Derek were to pick up and move their family and start a new life. This plan ends too abruptly when Danny is shot and killed the very next day in school by a black student he had had a confrontation with the previous day.
Topher
Continuity mistake: Toward the beginning, when the principal calls Danny into his office to discuss his Mein Kampf paper, he first glares at the Jewish teacher who exits the principal's office. As the teacher is walking past, the clock on the wall reads 8:10. But when the camera angle changes to show him walk around a corner, the same clock reads 8:20. Apparently it took him 10 minutes to turn the corner.
Bob Sweeney: There was a moment, when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me, that I saw happen to my people. Used to blame everybody. Blamed White people, blamed society, blamed God. I didn't get no answers 'cause I was asking the wrong questions. You have to ask the right questions.
Derek Vinyard: Like what?
Bob Sweeney: Has anything you've done made your life better?
Trivia: At the end, when Danny is heard quoting from the paper he wrote for Dr. Sweeney, the quote which begins "We are not enemies, but friends..." is the closing paragraph from President Abraham Lincoln's first Inaugural Address on the 4th of March 1861.
Question: We see something going on between the corrupt skinhead and the Hispanic criminal inside the prison, and it makes Vinyard leave that gang. What exactly was the arrangement by the skinheads to 'protect' Vinyard?
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Answer: It's quite simple: He was one of them, a fellow skinhead. In prison different groups stick together for mutual protection and comradeship, and as neo-nazis/skinheads would be fairly unpopular with the colored inmates, all the more reason for them to protect each other.
Twotall