After a long and troubled journey, a film version of Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil has finally made it to the screen. Too bad it didn't take a lot longer. Directed with steamroller-like grace by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), Apt Pupil stars Ian McKellen as a former concentration-camp commandant whose hiding place in a California suburb is disturbed by a gifted teen (Brad Renfro) with an alarmingly enthusiastic desire to learn more about all things Nazi-related. Renfro blackmails McKellen into sharing his war stories, a task McKellen treats with reluctance at first. But before long, he's dressing the part, goose-stepping in the kitchen, stabbing vagrants, and attempting to shove neighborhood cats into the oven. Apt Pupil treats Nazis the way other films treat vampires, as single-minded monsters; it wouldn't seem out of place if Singer had included a scene in which McKellen explains how he was bitten by Joseph Goebbels in a deserted Heidelberg alleyway. This is preferable, of course, to anything suggesting a sympathetic portrayal, but it pretty much invalidates the film's heated talk about the nature and origins of evil. Renfro's character, suggested as a budding master of fascism-inspired super-villainy, is a cipher more akin to something out of The Omen than a real person, and Apt Pupil's use of the Holocaust and concentration-camp imagery does far more than border on the exploitative and offensive. McKellen is fine, of course, but the film as a whole offers about as much insight into evil as Ming The Merciless in a Flash Gordon serial. There have been far less competent films made this year, but this shallow, barely human portrayal of inhumanity is a pretty strong contender for the year's worst.