A bit preachy/patronising?

I like this movie - it's a good movie overall.

I can't help but getting this feeling though, that the artistic quality is a bit compromised for the sake of getting the moral across. I guess a movie named after a school subject is bound to be didactic and one cannot expect otherwise (duh). But I would like to have seen it all in a more subtle way: some of the dialogues, events, characters etc were a bit too obvious and one-dimentional or, in some cases, forced. I can't help but feeling that the same material and the same actors would have made an even better movie if the script and the set-up of some scenes were different and more subtle.

Example: the two bros go back home after their heart-to-heart about Derek's time in prison and take down all the Nazi memorabilia. It's not very realistic that the little brother immediately changed his mind about everything he believed in for the last 3 years and immediately realised his mistake despite all the brainwashing he's received by the gang and the cult-leader-weirdo whom he sees as a father figure. I mean, it took *me* a while to take down the Backstreet Boys posters in my room when I eventually grew out of that pre-teen boy-band phase and I wasn't even into the Backstreet Boys that much :p I just think this scene was there for the sake of its symbolism and at the expense of the film's overall realism.

~*~