Stand And Deliver deals with a lot of inner city kids who have grown up in a bad neighborhood and who all have dismal outlooks for the future. Edward James Olmos delivers the performance of his career as Jaime Esclante, the math teacher who comes to this school determined to teach these kids calculus and have them succeed in school to inspire them to improve the rest of their lives. The rest of the staff at Garfield High School has just as little faith in him and his efforts as they do in the rest of the school, and the film is also able to remain even more interesting because it deals with the lives of the kids outside of the school as well as in the classroom.
Because the film presents such a realistic image of inner city life, we are completely engrossed with the atmosphere and the efforts of Mr. Escalante to teach these kids advanced mathematics, when many times they don't even want to put forth the effort themselves. There have been many films made about students with little to no potential showing that they are capable of being educated, and Stand and Deliver ran a huge risk of being repetitive when it was released, but it manages to cover new ground because it deals with so many different levels of the lives of the kids and the efforts of the teacher to teach them. The film is able to revolve not just around the kids trying to learn or the teacher trying to teach them, but around both of these things as well as around the daily lives of the students and the teacher and even the health and relationship of Mr. Escalante with his wife.
We are introduced to a variety of fascinating and memorable characters in this film, particularly in Mr. Escalante, played brilliantly by Edward James Olmos, and especially Angel, played by Lou Diamond Phillips (who, by the way, can be seen at his desk on the cover of the movie, but can't be seen on the IMDb's top billed list of cast on the Stand and Deliver page). The movie has the perfect amount of comic relief that is genuinely amusing but that doesn't take away from the overall appeal and seriousness of the movie.
I can't say that there were no scenes within the film that were dramatized for effect, thereby illustrating the influences of Hollywood on the film, but even these scenes did not take away enough from the total value of the movie and the story that it presents to tarnish the real life accomplishments of Jaime Escalante, his calculus class, and the many students thereafter at Garfield High School that managed to pass the same test that we saw in this movie. This is wonderful entertainment for the entire family, don't miss it!
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