Social Misfits

A group of delinquent kids gets herded out to a facility named Camp Resurrection in the middle of the desert, where they are to be held for 48 hours and presumably learn some life lessons in that time, despite having no counseling and a brutal supervisor. In the real world, such a solution seems unrealistic, but then again, in the real world, characters don't stand up and give long monologues about their childhood in front of complete strangers. In other words, this film is staged and performed like a play, complete with actors who believe that shouting the last part of every sentence automatically makes it more dramatic. And we have to bring up the film's novel approach toward ending racial tensions -- simply get all the bigots of every color together and tell them to go beat up a rapist. As the "leader" of the group, Tyrone Tann (also the film's cowriter) does a capable job of holding our attention, despite the fact that his character is the least developed of them all. Director Rene Villar Rios, meanwhile, tries to enliven things with some nifty pseudo-Hitchcockian camera angles. An apparent "surprise twist" ending, however, needs better fleshing out, as it merely serves to obscure rather than reveal. And it's hard to escape the fact that the whole movie feels like a public service infomercial.