Altar Boys. Nuns. Dangerous
Located nearby the bittersweet suburban 1970s of The Virgin Suicides, this coming-of-age tale centres on four Catholic school boys obsessed with comic books and playing pranks on their teacher, stern peg-leg Sister Assumpta (Foster, who also produced).
Spliced in with their escapades are 2-D animation sequences – neatly done in period fantasy style by Spawn’s Todd McFarlane – in which the boys’ alter egos The Atomic Trinity wage battle against their religious oppressors.
Playing ringleader, Culkin shows the mischievous form he worked in Igby Does Down, while Hirsch (soon to pilot Speed Racer) transitions from adolescent cipher to properly affecting as the story’s emotional fulcrum. Foster, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jena Malone are all excellent in support, the latter playing a troubled variant on her frail girlfriend from Donnie Darko.
Altar Boys doesn’t strive to revolutionise the genre, but by playing to what it knows the film works as an appealing teenage reminiscence.
Spliced in with their escapades are 2-D animation sequences – neatly done in period fantasy style by Spawn’s Todd McFarlane – in which the boys’ alter egos The Atomic Trinity wage battle against their religious oppressors.
Playing ringleader, Culkin shows the mischievous form he worked in Igby Does Down, while Hirsch (soon to pilot Speed Racer) transitions from adolescent cipher to properly affecting as the story’s emotional fulcrum. Foster, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jena Malone are all excellent in support, the latter playing a troubled variant on her frail girlfriend from Donnie Darko.
Altar Boys doesn’t strive to revolutionise the genre, but by playing to what it knows the film works as an appealing teenage reminiscence.
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