Reviewed by: Joe

Directed by: Michael Hoffman

Produced by: Mark Abraham, Andrew Karsch, Marc Abraham, Sean Bailey, & Andrew S Karsch

Cast: Kevin Kline, Emile Hirsch, Embeth Davidtz, Joel Gretsch, & Rob Morrow

1 hr. 49 min. Based on the short story "The Palace Thief" by Ethan Canin, Kevin Kline stars as William Hundert, a passionate and principled Classics professor who finds his tightly-controlled world shaken and inexorably altered when a new student, Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch), walks into his classroom. What begins as a fierce battle of wills gives way to a close student-teacher relationship, but results in a life lesson for Hundert that will still haunt him a quarter of a century later.

The Emperor’s Club, as ambitious and well-intentioned as it tries to be, delivers on Hundert’s opening statement on being “a story without surprises” and results in nothing more then a regurgitation of all the teacher/coming of age dramas that have been done to death in the past. In the end, despite the hard intentions of the filmmakers to wrap things up in an appropriate manner, the emphasis on the film’s story is lost and the audience is left thinking, “So what?” The main problem is that there is no emotional connection with any character, including Mr. Hundert, to really drive home the point that the filmmakers present at the end of this film. They spend so much time focusing on the solitary conflicts between Mr. Hundert and Sedgewick Bell that, in a way, they contradict themselves in the statement, “The worth of a life is not determined by a single failure or a solitary success”. Had they followed up on that line, it would have resulted in a look into all the lives of the students rather then a specific

Although that too would have been nothing different from Dead Poet’s Society, it is admirable for a film to be bland and predictable then to contradict itself on the message it tries to express. That is not to say that The Emperor’s Club is not entertaining, Kline’s performance and James Newton Howard’s memorable musical score prevent it from being a total wash, but film expresses thoughts on a subject matter that has been done numerous times in the past without divulging on anything new or thought provoking.