Studying the evil within

Guten Tag. Sit down and have some milk and cookies with Arthur Denker. Sure, he's a little cranky, but he could be your crotchety old grandpa. Maybe he'll endear himself to you with his atrocious war stories while you do your homework at his house. After all, how often do you get to meet your friendly neighborhood Nazi War Criminal? If you're at all like Todd Bowden of Apt Pupil, he just might become your sick obsession.

Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) unleashes a relentlessly creepy morality drama on the horrors of homegrown evil in this clumsy adaptation of Steven King's novella of the same name. Evil indeed does have a face, and it could be lurking within your local Holocaust-obsessed high school valedictorian. And you thought there weren't enough reasons to hate those nerds.

One such nerd is Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), a normal, intelligent, All-American boy. He's a 16 year-old senior. His parents are simpering dweebs. He draws swastikas on his classwork, hides Nazi propaganda in his room and has a pathetically mustachioed David Schwimmer for a guidance counselor. After a special segment on the Holocaust in his European history class, he takes his teacher's advice on further research to the extreme and buries himself in literature of World War II atrocities. A recipe for evil lying dormant in American high schools, no doubt.

The perfect opportunity to delve further into this lurid interest in human misery arrives one night during a ride home on the city bus: Why, there's a suspicious character who looks just like the infamous Kurt Dussander (Sir Ian McKellen), a Nazi officer wanted on countless charges of wartime atrocities. We know it's him at first glance. Todd sets out to blackmail the unassuming Dussander (living under the alias Arthur Denker) in exchange for the truth about "what they're too scared to tell you in school." Forget that Israeli Intelligence could never find this guy. It takes an American kid with a Secret Decoder Fingerprint Kit to identify the German fugitive living just down the street. American students fall behind the rest of the world in math, but they sure know how to track those Nazi war criminals.

Thus ensues the high drama and thunderous suspense. Dussander is an evil old man, and his repugnant villainy soon infects Todd. Nazi habits die hard, it seems. Todd soon has the scowling German goose-stepping in full SS regalia and leering maliciously at cats before tossing them yowling into his gas oven. Cruelty to animals, is of course, the first step into the fiery pits of hell, and soon Todd begins whacking off helpless animals, eventually working his way up to murder.

Apt Pupil functions well as a dark, foreboding thriller, taut with suspense and elements of cruel horror, but its weak premise and the gaping holes in the plot result in the demise of a potentially interesting story. Renfro (convincing and earnest in his debut, The Client)turns in an efficient and unadorned performance, evolving from school-boyish charm to narrow-eyed menace. McKellen, an otherwise accomplished British actor, manages somehow to be embarrassingly cartoonish as the glowering Nazi, complete with a hocking, guttural accent and all that gleeful leering-he does everything but wear a monocle. Unfortunately, Schwimmer's goofy guidance counselor reaches the finale unscathed.

Singer's direction is certainly polished and stylistically impressive, but his talents were much better suited to the far superior crime drama The Usual Suspects. The problem stems from his decision to allow his good buddy to write the flawed screenplay that's not quite so apt.

Mein Herr, won't you be-please won't you be-my neighbor?