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Starring Tom Berenger. ![[Photo]](/photos/substitute1-1.jpg) Of all the Inner City High School Movies, The Substitute stands out as being the most far-fetched and the most ridiculous. However, for some reason, it is still mildly entertaining. Part of this stems from the fact that The Substitute isn't your regular Inner City High School Movie, complete with a teacher who wants to help the disenfranchised students, and youths facing a decidedly up hill battle, but rather, this is an action film inside an inner city high school. This difference allows director Robert Mandel to experiment with scenes set outside the classroom, something that most of the other films in this genre fail to do with any sense of regularity, and also lets the characters bring large guns into the scenes that are set in the classroom which does bring a slightly heightened sense of tension to the proceedings. Tom Berenger stars as Shale, a top of the line, tough as an H&K sub-machine gun mercenary with scruples. He might be getting paid to kill--such is the definition of the word mercenary--but neither he, nor his team will kill for drugs. I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere. After a successful, yet deadly mission to Cuba, Berenger and his mercenary team find themselves looking for work. When Berenger's girlfriend, herself a dedicated inner city teacher, gets severely beaten by some of her students, Berenger uses his connections to take her place, and serve as her substitute, in an effort to get revenge. The kids, of course, are a bunch of disrespectful punks who drive around in BMW's and Mercedes thanks to the cocaine ring of which they are a part. The ring leader? Ernie Hudson, whose performance reeks of movie-of-the-week quality, plays the principal of the high school where Berenger is teaching. And ultimately, Berenger and his team decide to duke it out against the students and the mercenaries that the students and principal hire to protect their drugs. Plausible? Uh, no. Vaguely possible? The answer is still no. What piqued my interest in this most unrealistic film though, was the way in which Berenger used his mercenary gadgetry and friends to defeat the little thugs attending Miami's worst high school. Berenger has a way of showing up in extraordinarily poor films, including The Last of the Dogmen, Chasers, and Sliver just since 1993, and he can now add The Substitute ![[Photo]](/photos/substitute1-2.jpg) to that list of sub-par pictures because, no matter how good this 25 word pitch may have been, or how technologically proficient Berenger's crew was, in the end, we witnessed a team of hardened, professional soldiers that survived Vietnam, a covert attack on Cuba, and several trips to the middle east that were ripped apart by their attempts to infiltrate a high school. This might be good for one brainless viewing, emphasis on 'might be' and 'brainless', but in the larger scheme of things, probably isn't worth the effort. Despite several very entertaining moments, only Stand and Deliver falls below The Substitute among the Inner City High School Movies.
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