Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

BelSports 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.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

SnoopyStyle Coach Duke Goulding (Martin Sheen) intends to win the championship for the mostly white boarding school Palmetto Grove Hawks. Odin James (Mekhi Phifer) is the hero while coach's own son Hugo Goulding (Josh Hartnett) is put down. Duke tells the school that he love Odin like his own son and gives him the MVP award. Odin calls out wealthy Michael Cassio (Andrew Keegan) as his go to guy. Odin is dating Dean Bob Brable (John Heard)'s daughter Desi (Julia Stiles). Jealous Hugo sets up Odin with the help of weak-minded Roger Calhoun who is in love with Desi.This is a modern day adaptation of the Shakespeare play Othello. The adaptation is not entirely smooth. There is a sense of unreality but the young cast maintains the believability. They are all quite solid in their roles. Josh Hartnett is actually good in an underhanded role which is different than his usual mind-mannered good guy roles. Phifer is brash which is appropriate. It's a solid adaptation.

artieup I can't judge what others, and some "So Called" critics, use as their sole rating of movies etc.. however, for this movie to receive less than a 6 is absolute ridiculous in my opinion.This has been a great movies collection for me for a number of years. I think it is drama at it's best with an modern re-script that wasn't all that bad. As the movie really had a heart felt ending that many movies as of post 2000 fail to do. This is exactly how Shakespeare wanted viewers to feel in regards to Othello.I'm no pro on how well he or she should act in a movie, but I would say Mekhi, Josh, and Julia Stiles did a quite a dam good job on their roles with this movie.Anyhow, each to their own as to how they rate a movie. Believe it or not there are probably over 70% of movie viewers who don't give much a flick about how well a actor/actress acted but how well the movie made them felt and was the plot and ending worth the watch.There really need to be a double standard on movie ratings.. Judgement on the Acting and Judgement on the overall movie plot and ending. You must agree there have been some quite poor acting in movies that however grossed well and many watch over and over. Just my opinion.

luvsnails The only reason I don't give this a zero out of 10 is the fact that Julia Stiles is excellent in her role, as is Josh Hartnett. But as to being a brilliant reworking of Othello that adapts to show the dangers of teen-age violence, envy, jealousy and lust? I think not. Virtually everyone in this melodramatic update is an overdone caricature of who they play in the movie. While the bullying scenes and picking on the dweeb are accurate enough, they are followed by a succession of stupid decisions by everyone involved in the plot. Even Julia Stiles' attraction to "O" and his monstrous ego is annoyingly dumb, but then hey... that's the story. The interracial aspect adds nothing to the story either. As a lesson depicting the evils of teen violence, it doesn't work. There's far too much cunning for a teen ager by Hartnett's character, and far, far too much gullible idiocy by "O". The only thing I took away from this movie is bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, and the thought that I am SO glad Martin Sheen was as good as he was on West Wing and won't be remembered for this disaster.

marissas75 One of the wave of teen-Shakespeare adaptations of the late 1990s/early 2000s, "O" resets the story of "Othello" among basketball players at an elite South Carolina prep school. It follows the original story very closely, changing only a few incidents in order to fit with the idea that the characters are now teenagers. For instance, now Hugo (the Iago figure, played by Josh Hartnett) is jealous of Odin (the Othello figure, Mekhi Phifer) because Hugo's dad, the basketball coach (Martin Sheen) favors Odin and ignores his own son.Unfortunately, making the characters teenagers just points up the implausibility of the story. While you could say that the amount of bloodshed and death at the end of Shakespeare's play is also hard to believe, at least those characters are military men living in a violent and patriarchal culture. It's much less credible that a modern-day prep school student could be coaxed into killing his supposedly unfaithful girlfriend.Phifer has some good moments when he depicts Odin's anguish, but isn't able to convince us that his character would so quickly resort to murder. Julia Stiles, as girlfriend Desi, is mostly weak and whiny. Hartnett overuses his furrowed eyebrows and whisper-voice to signal Hugo's dark intentions--and while handsome, he lacks the diabolical charisma necessary for this role. Indeed, the movie makes him almost sympathetic, which is problematic because then Odin seems more like a villain, the stereotypical "angry black kid." The worst things about "O" are its heavy-handed symbolism involving birds (hawks and doves) and its laughably bad dialogue. Its strings of clichés and swear words, supposedly representing teen-speak, would be irritating in any movie, but it feels even worse since we know that "O" was adapted from Shakespeare. When the movie tries to rewrite Shakespeare's memorable lines, it's even more painful. Iago's famous speech denouncing the idea of "reputation" becomes Hugo saying "Reputation, who gives a f***?" So, while it was a worthy idea to try to adapt the Othello story to a contemporary setting, I doubt that the reputations of the actors, director and screenwriter have been enhanced by their participation in "O."