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This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Cheaters is a reasonable to good film that never really threatens to be anything more than that, as its characters have no depth and at times it can be quite amateurish. It has an interesting story and is an engaging film however.It's basically "Cool Runnings" all over again :). Jena Malone and Jeff Daniels are good, but the rest of the cast is pretty weak. Apart from the poor characters, my biggest problem with the film is how obvious they made it that they were cheating. Going from winning none of the awards to winning every single one.

It's 1994 in a run-down Chicago public high school. Dr. Gerard Plecki (Jeff Daniels) is the hopeful teacher organizing the Academic Decathlon team. The only student who shows up is the plucky Jolie Fitch (Jena Malone). She helps him recruit a ragtag group of diamonds in the rough. They get fifth and advance to state. However, they also see how far behind they are from the favorites. A couple of kids steal a copy of the state test and the group faces a true dilemma.It's interesting to see the story through the eyes of the cheaters. The characters make convincing arguments but it's also obvious that they are going down the wrong path. This conflicted morality makes this a difficult watch. Jeff Daniels is the senior presence and Jena Malone makes this compelling. The production isn't the highest quality but it works for a TV movie.

I can see how some might find this film rewarding - watching the little guy take down the overbearing elitists that win every year. Those homogeneous white kids at Whitney Young all wear button down shirts, and come from privileged backgrounds. And that Larry Minkoff, he just wanted his team to crush the other schools. That all makes nice drama, but has little to do with the actual story. Sure, Cheaters, is based on a true story, but its omissions and perversions of the truth make it little more than a piece of trash.You won't be surprised to learn that I actually went to Whitney Young. When I first saw HBO's incarnation of my high school, I had to laugh – WY is a Chicago Public School (although a magnet) with a minority of white students and not an Oxford shirt to be found. I got over it pretty quickly, however, when the film turned into a character assassination of a man that had died tragically the previous year and kids that had worked their butts off to get where they were. Cheaters portrays WY as claiming Steinmetz cheated because they beat them. In reality, Steinmetz was the only school in the competition to improve – literally every other competing school's scores, including WY, had dropped significantly. Young raised the charge, but they were not alone in thinking something other than increased study time at Steinmetz's had happened.I appreciate how difficult it can be for neighborhood schools to compete with magnet schools, which select students based on test scores and are given more flexibility with curriculum. It provides a disparity that can be very difficult or even impossible to overcome. The ultimate message of Cheaters, however, seems to be that sometimes you need to cheat to succeed. I'm not really sure that's an ideal to strive toward. Also, it's portrayal of Larry Minkoff was very hurtful to his family, friends, and everyone who knew him for the kind and generous man he actually was. This film has made me watch films that claim to be "true stories" or based thereon with a much more critical eye. I hope anyone who reads this will take Cheaters with a very large grain of salt.

What I absolutely loved about this movie is the fact that it displays a genuine moral dilemma without necessarily preaching anything. It doesn't provide viewers a standpoint for moral ascendancy, instead, the viewers get the pleasure of interpreting the situation, thus gaining that threshold for ascendancy.I'd say the film did play out a bias, and the bias was in favor of the students from Steimetz High. I'd say that it is rather a fair bias, because it is rare to see the cheaters as the protagonist. Amidst this, they weren't portrayed as the over-glamorized heroes that will promote a cheating society. What John Stockwell did was to give us a dose of reality, an arena for sympathize with cheaters, at the same time, displaying the consequences of the human act.I love the mixture of documentary footages. Opening Credits was awesome, wherein there were raw footage in grainy stock of actual American high school. It played greatly on the emotional framework that the film worked on and I'm so glad my parents were able to find a copy of the film on DVD.