Search - Killing Mr Griffin on DVD

Killing your teacher, even accidentally, is not a smart move

Lawrance M. Bernabo | The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota | 03/19/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I had to remind myself that I checked out "Killing Mr. Griffin" because Michelle Williams was in it and I had thrown all of her movies that I had not seen into my queue because she has done some fairly interesting Independent films since "Dawons's Creek." However, this made for television movie predates those dates. It was not really at the top of the queue, but I have a lot of movies on short, long and very long wait ahead of it and was looking for a horror film for Saturday night and this is what arrived.

The heroine of the film turns out to be Susan McConnell (Amy Jo Johnson, from "Felicity"), who used to be the favorite student of Mr. John Griffin (Jay Thomas), her English teacher. But her approaching senior year, boys, or other indeterminate issues related to teenage angst have set her back. The class is discussing and reading aloud Shakespeare's "Tragedy of Julius Caesar" and Amy's reading of the title role at the start of the assassination scene lacks the arrogance that Mr. Griffin demands. A few harsh words from the teacher send Amy back to her seat in tears. It is after this point that we learn that Amy is one of his better students. This is a surprise because the way he treats her is indistinguishable from the way he treats Mark Kinney (Scott Bairstow), a student with arrogance oozing from every pore who does not like being forced to apologize to his teacher before the class.

Mark exercises the divine right of the Big Man on Campus to take down the teacher who pointedly asks him, "Has anybody ever told you 'no' and really meant it?" So he gathers his small group of fans and gets them to go along with what he describes as a prank: they will kidnap Mr. Griffin, humiliate him the way he has humiliated them, get him to beg and videotape it. Either Griffin will treat them right, or the video will makes its way around the school. Mark gets his best bud Dave Ruggles (Mario López) to get Susan to be part of the plot. She does not want to, but changes her mind when she is the target of the teacher's barbs. Susan delivers the teacher to the trap, but when he is attacked his first words are for her to run to safety and her second thoughts kick in at that point. We are encouraged to have such thoughts about Mr. Griffin when he chats with his wife about what he is trying to accomplish in the classroom, but when class is in session he just seems like an angry burnout who is incapable of making a connection of convincing his students that he cares about either them or the material. Just film one of his classes and the principal is going to show this guy the door.

Short version of what happens at that point is that Mr. Griffin ends up dead and the only people who do not know who did it and how it ended up happening are the characters in this movie. So Susan and her classmates think they are in a mystery, when this 1997 television movie is just another teenage horror show. Susan ignores several obvious clues until she finally finds proof positive. Does this mean that the film will try to overstep its limitations to come up with an important or at least intrinsically interesting way of turning the tables? No it does not, and if you have not agreed to with this rating by that point then the coda provided by Susan's father will certainly have you reaching for your remote to at least spare you from wasting time on the credits."