Cheating knows no bounds. It breaks through the English-language barrier with Omer Faruk Sorak's entry into the fray, SINAV. The tale of five friends who conspire to beat "the big exam," the film opens with an intense nightmare montage and doesn't slow down from there. Even in the movie's most heartfelt moments there are few shots that last longer than five seconds. Otherwise the camera jumps around, the image goes from color to black & white and back again, and the film moves with at a pace that could trigger epileptic seizures. Despite this wild montage, at close to two hours SINAV becomes a rather tiresome venture.
Too much of the film is a build-up to any kind of educational larceny. The moral chasm of cheating appears to be more of a crack in the sidewalk to these youths who defiantly charge that they'll "steal questions from the ones who steal my youth." It doesn't help that the school has brought in a motivational speaker who now makes money selling exam tutorial classes but is best known for being "Armless Levo," a student who used an arm cast to sneak study sheets into examinations. And this successful businessman is their role model? The emotional center of the film is Mert (Ismail Hacioglu), a troubled teen who seems to have left school to get a job but has no trouble returning when he wants to fulfill his dying mother's dream of getting a proper education. While Mert deals with his mother's cancer and his inability to study, his compatriots all have their own home problems to face from the ever-bickering parents of Gazme (Rüya Önal) to the parents who want to get their son, Sinan (Yagmur Atacan) an exorcism since he doesn't test well.
SINAV plays like a Turkish version of THE PERFECT SCORE until it jettisons all heretofore structure of the film's own logic at the ninety-minute mark. Rather than performing some smaller heists for test keys and being general nuisances to the totalitarian teachers and principal, the kids decide to call in a world class thief, Charlie, who one of their own, Uluc (Volkan Demirok), met as a child. Only having the name, Uluk actually manages to find this thief after sending out 17,000 emails. When he arrives, everyone can't help but notice how much Charlie (Jean-Claude Van Damme) looks like Jean-Claude Van Damme.
In another brain-crushing twist, it turns out that Jean-Claude Van Damme is friends with Armless Levo and the two of them have cooked up a scheme to give the kids the wrong exam in order to teach them a valuable moral lesson. Ouch! Had the film stuck with the reality of the situation and kept up the potboiler pressure of parents, professors, and peers, SINAV may have worked. As it was, the Van Damme es Machina became a fatal flaw from which the film could not recover.
Too much of the film is a build-up to any kind of educational larceny. The moral chasm of cheating appears to be more of a crack in the sidewalk to these youths who defiantly charge that they'll "steal questions from the ones who steal my youth." It doesn't help that the school has brought in a motivational speaker who now makes money selling exam tutorial classes but is best known for being "Armless Levo," a student who used an arm cast to sneak study sheets into examinations. And this successful businessman is their role model? The emotional center of the film is Mert (Ismail Hacioglu), a troubled teen who seems to have left school to get a job but has no trouble returning when he wants to fulfill his dying mother's dream of getting a proper education. While Mert deals with his mother's cancer and his inability to study, his compatriots all have their own home problems to face from the ever-bickering parents of Gazme (Rüya Önal) to the parents who want to get their son, Sinan (Yagmur Atacan) an exorcism since he doesn't test well.
SINAV plays like a Turkish version of THE PERFECT SCORE until it jettisons all heretofore structure of the film's own logic at the ninety-minute mark. Rather than performing some smaller heists for test keys and being general nuisances to the totalitarian teachers and principal, the kids decide to call in a world class thief, Charlie, who one of their own, Uluc (Volkan Demirok), met as a child. Only having the name, Uluk actually manages to find this thief after sending out 17,000 emails. When he arrives, everyone can't help but notice how much Charlie (Jean-Claude Van Damme) looks like Jean-Claude Van Damme.
In another brain-crushing twist, it turns out that Jean-Claude Van Damme is friends with Armless Levo and the two of them have cooked up a scheme to give the kids the wrong exam in order to teach them a valuable moral lesson. Ouch! Had the film stuck with the reality of the situation and kept up the potboiler pressure of parents, professors, and peers, SINAV may have worked. As it was, the Van Damme es Machina became a fatal flaw from which the film could not recover.