zardoz-13 Review of The Substitute 2: School's Out

The Substitute 2: School's Out (1998 TV Movie)

A Bad Ending Ruins This Promising Sequel

[5/10 · 5 July 2010]

The murky conclusion of director Steven Pearl's straight-to-video sequel "The Substitute 2: School's Out" undercuts an otherwise okay sequel that goes to enormous ends to establish itself as the follow-up to the Tom Berenger original. Treat Williams plays an entirely different character who knew Shale, and "School's Out" concerns his search for the person who gunned down his brother in cold blood in broad daylight. Williams is suave but decisive as Karl Thomasson who masquerades as the new substitute teacher. B.D. Wong is superb as the slimy villain. The Miami high school in the first film, the school here is a zoo with abrasive students who play their boom boxes in class and tote around deadly weapons like ice picks. Unlike the villains in the predecessor who were trafficking in illegal drugs, the bad guys here are operating a chop shop for stolen cars that nets them a $100-thousand-a-month. Like the original, the most considerate character turns out to be the source of the trouble. During the first three-fourths of "The Substitute 2: School's Out," the scenarists of the first movie--Roy Frumkes, Rocco Simonelli, and Alan Ormsby--establish the reason for the sequel, neatly place the characters in the context of the original, and do a good job of integrating Karl into the action. The action scenes themselves, when Karl has to practice his expertise on the disruptive students as well as the adult villains, are fine, but everything collapses in the last quarter hour when the fatherless daughter discovers who killed her father. The filmmakers never have a confrontation scene between the hero and this villain. Moreover, the disruptive students in the classroom who should go down as hard as their counterparts did in the first movie are never shown receiving their just comeuppance for their crimes. The yo-yo scene where Karl explains the use of a yo-yo as a weapon is well-done as is the 'compromise' scene when he toss Mace's purloined boom box out the second story class room. Presumably, Mace is supposed to be the Jerome character here. The single character who doesn't have a counterpart from the first movie is Michael Michele; she plays a sympathetic school employee, Kara Lavelle, who is attracted to Karl. Initially, she met him at his brother's funeral. Not surprisingly, Karl's niece (Susan May Pratt of "Drive Me Crazy")doesn't trust Karl at first, but she breaks down and gets to like him. The only character here that is truly exceptional is the high school custodian, Johnny Bartee (Daryl Edwards of "Arthur 2: On the Rocks"), who has an unique way of entering and exiting through the tunnels in the walls. He is a former Vietnam soldier who specialized in going into tunnels to flush out the Viet Cong. One of the things that the filmmakers do that looks cool is that the car-jacking gang wears their cotton windbreakers backwards so the hood covers them faces and they have slit eye-holes to see. One of the survivors from the first movie, Joey 6, reappears here but he is played by a different actor.