Shame, shame on the creators of `The Substitute'
If I were ever to have just one chance to punish the people responsible for making a particular film, I'd definitely pick those behind The Substitute .
Tom Berenger (shame on you) stars as Shale, a tough-minded, old-school Cro-Magnon sort of mercenary who leads a band of similarly enlightened übersoldiers in an assault on a drug lab in Cuba. When the operation doesn't go as planned, the paper-pushing officials in Washington deny their existence, effectively terminating their employment.
So Shale pops back into the life of his on-again, off-again girlfriend, played by Diane Venora (terrific in Heat ; but now, shame on you). She's a history teacher at beleaguered Columbus High School, where all of the students ( all of the students) are evil and out to kill her.
The prime villian at the school is Juan Lockez, who runs a big drug ring and has a goon whack his teacher in the leg with a stick while she's jogging on the beach. This is never really explained; I suspect he blames her for getting him involved in this movie.
While she recuperates, loverboy Berenger fills in as a substitute teacher, with the help of his pals, who provide a fake identity for him and name him James Smith. Imaginative, isn't it?
I guess the writers (all three of them: shame on them) focused their collective creativity on making this film as offensive as possible. If they didn't do a perfect job of that, they came as close as you will ever want them to get.
When Tommy Boy takes over the class, he must cope with the unruly kids, the disrespectful gangbangers and an overfriendly cop-turned-principal (played by Ernie Hudson: shame on you) who coddles the students like they are, well, students.
All of this is very closely connected, because we soon learn that the pencil-pushing politico principal is really in cahoots with the evil students, pushing dope for The Man while he babbles on about the school's day-care center or the rights of students.
Berenger, needless to say, is not happy about any of this and decides to use his crew to both clean things up at the school and turn a handsome profit by swiping the dealers' money.
Working toward this goal, he returns again and again to the somewhat hostile work environment of the history classroom, where he lectures about his Vietnam experience and the history of gangs. He does this in between busting heads and throwing students out of windows.
Also on hand is one of the film's few not-absolutely-evil minorities, a drama teacher played by Glenn Plummer (shame on you, for your roles in both Showgirls and The Substitute ).
But worry not; Plummer's character is soon revealed to be a whining crybaby for crying racism when Berenger accuses the principal of involvement in drug dealings. He's soon killed off, the sacrifice which is apparently necessary before Berenger can step in and really take out the trash.
There is a host of other levels on which this movie is absolutely wretched, but I cannot conceivably begin to catalog them all.
At least, I suppose, this movie was consistently surprising: It got worse with each new development. And it was the most rabidly cinematic atrocity since Triumph of the Will . I guess that's something.
But it's not something you would want to spend a couple of hours paying money for and watching in a theater.
This movie may scare me off the action movie genre for years. I knew going in that, like most action flicks, it would be vacuous, silly, grossly inhumane and reliant upon the graphic display of human carnage to excite depraved people's thrills, but The Substitute takes every aspect of the genre to a new nadir.
This is the worst film I have ever seen.
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the April 26, 1996 issue.
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