Sleepers (1997, VHS)

In this drama based on characters in Lorenzo Carcaterra's controversial book, four boys from Hell's Kitchen enter a reformatory where a cruel guard (Kevin Bacon) abuses them. Years later, two of them avenge their tormenter and stand trial.

This is an exquisitely crafted tale of revenge out of Hell's Kitchen. Four young teenage boys are sent to a reform school where they are regularly sodomized, beaten, and molested by four homosexual guards. Their shared experience is life altering as they suffer in silence, drift apart, and grow up. Years later, an opportunity to even the score arises. The four re-unite and execute an ingenious plan to expose the heinous perversion of the guards and exact their revenge. The story is tension filled and grips you from the outset.

Sleepers might've not been the most eloquent courtroom drama, and the tactics used might be unrefined, but I absolutely loved it! It showed the consequences of the guards' sadism, which affected the boys for the rest of their lives. Kevin Bacon was great in the movie because he knew how to make you hate him. It's always easy to have to like someone, but to get the opposite is marginally harder, In the beginning, you don't really know how everything fits together until the vengence. I don't think it's the boys (grown up) who've revenged themselves; the guards' old crimes caught up with them. It's a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo, but in a rough-spoken world with its innocence lost. They way it was filmed didn't idealize or moralize, which was good, and showed things merely as they were, and they as they are. None of them were perfect, and they all had their angles.

So whether or not it really happened or it's just a book Cracaterra decided to write to get even with someone, it's a really enjoyable movie. It was so sad, but not boo-hoo sad. Rather, it's a bad car accident, the kind that's all torn up, but you can't look away. So it's not for everyone, that much is true. The irony was devastating, and I didn't expect the ending. Also, you don't exactly SEE what they described in their flashbacks, but it's deftly blended to see the past and present pain. Like even when they're grown up, they don't escape the pain, but live in it.

This film is rated R