MUST TRY HARDER

REVIEWED - FREEDOM WRITERS:WITH all these Hollywood big-shots drawing inner-city youths away from violence by teaching them improving activities, it seems astonishing there is any street crime left in the US. But, just a month after The Rock used football to save one huddle of Californian youths in Gridiron Gang, Hilary Swank has tracked down another gang of unfortunates and has set out to improve them through literature.

Freedom Writers, as poorly executed as it is well intentioned, tells the true story of Erin Gruwell, a middle-class teacher, who, while teaching in a rough school in Long Beach, encouraged her students to exorcise their grim stories by putting them down on paper. In 1999, after many of the authors had graduated successfully, the diaries were published as a book.

Well done, Ms Gruwell. You sound like a good egg. Sadly, the film that has been banged together from your story should be handed back to its makers with the words "see me" scribbled in the margin.

Freedom Writers supposes a set of social problems so shallowly rooted that exposure to Anne Frank's diary alone can offer the victims passage to a warmer place. After meeting a Holocaust victim, we see one of the students cast his gun into a grating (where, presumably, somebody else will fashion it into a ploughshare). Later, another pupil brandishes a copy of Frank's book at Erin and actually manages to say: "Hey. When is Anne going to smoke Hitler?" She is to be disappointed.

The film feels like the work of well-intentioned fuddy-duddies trying hopelessly to connect with youths by speaking their groovy (is this the right word?) language. It looks, in fact, as if it were made by Swank's version of Gruwell. As she analyses the lyrics of Tupac and Snoop for her students, Swank conjures up images of dads dancing at discos and mums opining that Good Charlotte have a great beat.

In Hilary's defence she probably intends her character to be something of a boob. I still wanted to pop a cap on her ass throughout.