Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (April 8, 2024)
Among the crowded genre of films about inspirational instructors, 1988’s Stand and Deliver exists as one of the most prominent. Well-received at the time, lead actor Edward James Olmos earned an Oscar nomination and the movie remains seen as one of the better entries in its domain.
Jamie Escalante (Olmos) ditches his career as an engineer to become a math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Confronted with students who experience perpetually poor results, he brings a curriculum packed with high expectations and improves their scores.
Eventually Escalante embraces a bigger challenge: to get his students to pass the daunting Advanced Placement exam in Calculus. In the fact of a difficult task, Escalante pushes his pupils to succeed.
As implied, nothing about Stand gives us a novel tale – well, beyond the movie’s origins. While many stories of this sort offer pure fiction, Stand comes based on the work of the real Escalante.
Of course, Stand takes some liberties with the source, but at least it stems from the truth. That factual basis adds a bit of charge that we wouldn’t get from a totally fictional project.
However, a basis in reality doesn’t ensure a quality film any more than total fiction inherently becomes inferior. Just because Stand focuses on a real character doesn’t mean it’ll soar.
Whatever the nature of the source, Stand provides a fairly engaging inspirational tale. While it can seem pat, it nonetheless does what it needs to do.
Probably the movie’s biggest issue stems from the semi-generic nature of the genre. As implied earlier, stories of this sort abound, and they tend to follow a similar framework in which the teacher encounters resistance but beats the odds.
Usually a large chunk of the narrative would devote to the teacher’s attempts to win over oppositional students. That barely becomes a plot point here, as Escalante pretty quickly charms the kids.
Instead, the prep for – and aftermath of – the AP exam turns into the major thrust here, and that works fine. It seems like an unusual choice but it gives the movie a bit more tension than otherwise might occur since the pupils get accused of cheating.
This still allows for the expected triumphant finale, though it comes with complications along the way. Should I label the happy ending as a spoiler?
Maybe, but I think it’d become much more of a surprise if a film like this didn’t conclude on a positive note. The journey becomes the more important part, and Stand seems fairly engaging in that regard.
Stand can bite off an awful lot for a 103-minute movie, and that turns into the reason why it races through so much of the preliminary material. While the film mainly wants to focus on the AP test domains, it needs to give us background to get there.
As such, we need the elements that introduce Escalante to his students and show the ways in which he bonds with them. Again, most movies would’ve solely dealt with the “winning them over” theme, so we speed through these topics.
While the film could’ve spent more time to depict the instructor/student bonding, I feel the story couldn’t have simply skipped those sequences. The whole “underdog” situation needed to depict the kids’ low starting point.
The semi-superficial nature of the plot also impacts our time with Escalante and the kids. We get to know a little about the lead character and some of the students, but not a whole lot.
Again, this goes back to the film’s overreach. It simply tries to delve into too many story points and characters for one 103-minute piece.
Despite these issues, Stand proves rousing enough, and a good cast helps. Olmos adds personality not in his underwritten character, and fresh off his 1987 breakthrough with La Bamba, Lou Diamond Phillips manages to develop his streetwise “cholo” into something a bit more.
All of this leaves Stand as a superficial but enjoyable film. Though it needs more breathing room to really tell its story well, it still winds up as a likable effort.
