The Emperor's Club

A musty, fond-memory-styled movie about plucky, Puckish schoolboys and the dedicated, kindly educator who inspires them, The Emperor's Club seems motivated more by a desire to match mortarboards with Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting than by its own tale (based on a short story by Ethan Canin). Kevin Kline stars as a good-natured but fastidious classics professor at a boys' boarding school in the early 1970s that has his hands full with the intelligent but insolent teenage son (Emile Hirsch, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) of an arrogant senator. It's a movie of highly telegraphed archetypes slogging their way through clichés (the off-limits girls' school is just across the lake) and only-in-the-movies moments, such as the climactic scholarly trivia contest in which the three smartest boys in school don togas and answer questions on stage about the minutiae of Roman history. These settings, these characters, and this narrative arc--which is bookended by a present-day reunion in which the students show their true colors as adults--are so familiar that while the movie is not inept or boring, it never feels real enough to inspire much more than a shrug in response. Very optional. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by director Michael Hoffman, a 22-minute making-of featurette, 20 minutes of deleted scenes with optional commentary by Hoffman, text cast and filmmaker bios, a trailer, and DVD-ROM features. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a depressingly conventional film.] (R. Blackwelder)