Review of Light It Up

I was a bit puzzled over this film. Yahoo gave it one and a half stars, a rating usually for really bad films (but not really bad films with budgets over $30 million). This was not a bad film, far from it. The first ten minutes really set the realism of certain public schools in New York, with middle management a slave to their superiors' concerns over their public image at the expense of the students. I looked at the Rotten Tomatoes list of reviews some of which acknowledged good aspects of this film. But some said it was formulaic. Well...yes? What will happen 100% of the time if a NYPD officer is shot and those responsible barricade themselves in? I suppose aliens were supposed to come down and rescue them? What mattered in this film was that it told the story from the students point of view and it told, with realism, some of the hard truths about bureaucracies who care about their image in sound bites and time of TV news but not really about the deficiencies of their system. It is enough to say that you felt with the students and it was told in their language. Apologies to the critics who felt a quick Caliban monologue should have been inserted. The ending was somewhat Breakfast Clubbish and, I agree, fantasy but all in all a truthful realistic film